This week’s drawing prompt on Doodle Addicts was “your favorite season”, which for me is this one, with it’s interesting weather and chill air and rainbow of colors. This drawing wasn’t drawn directly from, but inspired by, the view from my studio window this past Monday morning. It was sunny and sparkling after a weekend of blustery wind and brief thunder storms. Michigan is a strange place, for so many reasons, but it’s so beautiful.
Like all of my landscapes, this doesn’t really do it justice. Landscapes are hard. Instead of trying to describe a vision that’s sitting around fully formed in your imagination, you have to take the literal visual confusion and parse it out into what’s important, what you want to keep, and what you want to focus on. Because unless what you’re going for is photo accuracy (and I hardly ever am because I get bored looking at photo-realistic art), those are the choices that define a landscape. They’re hard choices to make, and I’m not really good at them yet.
I was glad for the prompt this week, though, because landscapes are so much fun and this time of year is so beautiful, and I always look back through my sketchbooks and wistfully wonder why I didn’t spend more time on landscapes.