Following up my previous post in this series, Visions of Whence Part 1, I’ve got a look at, yes! You guessed it! Visions of Whence Part 2.

As a quick refresher, the first post covered a look at the initial thumbnail and digital value study. I also included a look at the first step in the drawing as well as a bit about just what this piece is for (a hardcover sketchbook collection)!

What we’ll walk through today is a look at the next steps of the drawing and getting the piece to about 90%.

My first pass at any drawing is almost always with a brown Col-erase pencil. I like the warmth of the line and gently blocking in my shapes.

Speaking of shapes, this one is a decent size so keeping a handle on the proportions is a special challenge. I’m constantly standing up from my drafting table to evaluate.

But that above photo is getting ahead of things just a bit. Here’s the second pass at the pencil. Typically, I work in three stages. Brown pencil rough, a light pencil (below) and then I got in for the finished drawing.

For this I wanted to keep the drawing pretty light and refined. If I’m in a hurry or my mind wanders too far I’ll have a tendency to get heavy handed and work too firmly. It can work, and the feeling I want varies from piece to piece, but for this I wanted to avoid getting to overpowered with the line quality. A gentle touch is the key.

I felt like I was missing something in the lower left hand corner so after a little playing around with shapes I added these banner-toting fellows.

A poorly lit photo of this thing in progress.


At last I arrived at pretty much 90%.

Only 90%? You can see the bottom right figure is still the light pencil stage. As well as the ground itself and there’s still only the brown pencil indication of sky and clouds as of yet. Why? Well, I’m figuring about four or five more hours work for this thing. I’ve enjoyed working on it more than anything I’ve done for myself in a long time and I was just not about to rush things.

Plus, I thought it might be interesting, for the sake of comparison, to see what it looks like with a portion in progress.

Here’s a detail.

If any of the elements or figures in the piece look familiar or seem to be recurring images within my work, good! I’m working on bringing together my sketchbooks into a nice hardcover book and this is the cover (in progress) for the collection.

If you’re curious about my yearly sketchbooks you can see this previous post detailing a look at my 2017 project, The Walking Hills, which includes a few thoughts about why I create annual collections. Or, if you’re interested, you can visit my site and take a look through a selection of the yearly collections. (How’s this for professional, I’ve got two new sketchbooks I need to update this page with, 2016 and 2017, but! I just haven’t done it. Hey, there’s always 2018.)