Landscapes are tricky, as I mentioned earlier. The trick I am employing is to isolate individual elements and try to practice drawing them. I looked through the list of images and managed to narrow down to a few with very harsh lighting. The nice thing about harsh lighting is that there is very little gradation in the shades  you have very deep blacks and very bright whites. The image I chose to draw at the end was a early dry tree (more like a shrub) titled San Rafael Reef. This is also from the set of excellent images in the Ancient shape of man.

I have isolated the plant from the slightly more complex background. I guess I could have worked a bit more to showing some of the environment but decided I would keep it for future projects. The sun seems right overhead, The photographer has employed much skill in determinng the right exposure and developing / printing the image. It is usually very difficult to bring suble shades with harsh afternoon light but the image manages to do that. Was a nice challenge to see if I can get anywhere close to the actual print.

Another image from this excellent book. I have to mention that the book is primarily landscapes. There are fewer than 4-5 nude images. I have chosen to try them for drawing since I thought they are a good place to start. The tone is even and that lets me focus primarily on the shapes and lighting. I suppose landscapes are more simpler for some but to someone starting out, the varied textures, earth, sky, trees, leaves, rocks make it very challenging. I am not sure how I can bring the variety of textures using pencil / charcoal.

Seems to me that the nudes are more a neutral place to start as I have to bring out only the skin tones. I am not pleased with the outcome yet as the original image has a very nice sheen in the highlights… Maybe with  more practice and trial, I will get to understand how to make the shine work.

The images are not very clean as I drew them using charcoal on paper and took a picture with my iphone in fluoroscent light.  Not the best of conditions but atleast, I can share the latest work.

Recently, borders book shop had a sale in Expo. I was there to collect the race pack for my marathon (will write about it another day) and happened to ‘find’ the sale going on. Not one to miss a good deal and given I have been hunting down good sources for drawing ideas, I hopped in and after a long search through many aisles of paperback fiction, cook books and Guinness record publications, I was about to give up the search when I passed through the ‘reference’ section.

They had a large pile of encyclopedias and I found some hardbound photography books buried under. I found 2 good photo books:

• Fragile Earth: A collection of images showing changes to the earth due to natural events and some due to human intervention. A great coffee table book (though I don’t have coffee tables).
• Ancient shape of man: A beautifully printed set of black and white images. The prints are great and images grand. I think this is probably one of the nicest photo books I have. I think I would start collecting good ones if I can. And I am not complaining the price either, I got it for literally 5 USD

Monochrome is a great medium to admire textures without being distracted by colors and I suppose that is one of the reasons I would like to learn and understand building images in mono. Inspired b yone of the images, I tried my hand at depicting one of them here.