Early start on another landscape. This one is the old Cirencester Road from a photo again, the actual location is near the small village of Miserden on the top of the Cotswolds. The drawing is at the first stage, that is: get some colour on there and see how it goes, then revise and revise until you come to some sort of logical conclusion. That logical conclusion can be to tear it up and start again. In this case, not just yet, it’s going ok, but plenty of time to foul it up.

I know what I want to do with it but not quite sure how. I’ll post up the final in due course, but it might be a while, and there’s always the risk of failure.

To give some idea of scale this is on an A1 piece of card, and I took it onto a sunny part of the lawn to take the picture. That’s a moth on the top left, basking in the late afternoon sunshine. I took it as a compliment that it landed on my picture.

I’ve started about 8 of these landscapes, this one seems to have gone better than some of the others. I leave them around my workspace, so that I can see them and muse on what to do next with them. I’ve generally done other drawings of the same subject but this lot is my ‘hand coloured phase’, and I mean that in both senses of the word. I colour them with my hands and I get coloured hands!

This is the black and white version. Drawn in Indian ink and then a little bit of grey pastel added, for atmosphere. I’m hoping to get the same sort of feel, but in colour of course, for this next version. It was photographed on a winters day, but with a lot of sunshine around. Precious few moths around then.

The location is one of my very favourite places in the area. Few people visit this particular spot which has a view of countryside untouched in centuries. In the old days the track running through the picture would have had the odd farm cart wandering along, or some people herding their sheep, but not much else.

There’s work to be done on the colour one, and I’m looking forward to getting stuck into it.