Environment Study (Patreon)

I've been trying to improve my environments, starting with a practice of "foreground, middleground and background". You can read a bit more about my practice with that here. 

For quite awhile I had been trying to generate images from my imagination, but I kept getting stuck, or thinking of the same three or four variations. I realized I needed more input - more examples studied from life that I can add to my memory for the future. 

So I decided to take the exercise to marker and try to study some photos. 

This sort of worked. I found that the photos I was studying didn't really match the dark-to-light structure that I was being taught, so trying to map it that way didn't really lead to environments that were very readable. 

I decided to switch again, to a method I'm a lot more comfortable with: line and hatching. 

I think this one worked a lot better! I'm much more comfortable with line, and it gave me more control over the values when I was hatching. Of all the ones I've done so far, these read to me like actual environments. 

Next, I think I'm going to change tactic again. I have to think about how I'm going to do it. Either I'm going to go more granular and focus on environmental objects (like trees and rocks, which I would like to improve) or double down on working with value to describe a space. Maybe I'll continue on with that video course and see where it leads :)