Today I scrimmed the last section, the pine trees. I'm only going to show you close up pics today. It's sooo close to being done, I just want to darken the shadows on the bears a tiny bit, maybe do a few highlights, and then it'll be done, so you'll just have to wait to see the whole picture. What a tease.
I should have done a closeup scan of the blank area, but I didn't think of that til after the fact. Oops! So here it is with a "base coat" of dots, giving a pale gray tone. Eh, too pale:
Added more dots, yup that's better:
The trees roughed in with soft graphite. Yes, I know that's not pretty. [EDIT] I was PM'd a question about this so I think I need to explain it better. I was asked why I appear to have my lines crossing over the foreground tree branches, but then later these lines are gone. Okay, what you see the pic directly below this paragraph are lines drawn with soft graphite, just roughing out where the foremost pine trees will be and how tall they will be. Soft graphite won't scratch the surface, so I just kind drew it willy nilly on there, no problem that it overlaps the foreground branches. When I then work into it with the scrim tool, I do NOT scrim over any of the foreground material, I'm quite careful about that. The graphite wipes right off, so when I ink it any traces of graphite lines will disappear. Does that make sense? I hope that makes sense.
First pass at getting the foremost trees scrimmed in dark. Deliberately not all the way fleshed out or dark enough yet:
Added more dots, I wanted it darker, softer focus, and blending a little more with the willowy/bushy trees closer to the lake:
As the trees recede into the distance, I'm pretty much just making darker "diamond" shapes, smaller as they get farther back. At 10X magnification they look pretty ugly, but back off from it and voila, trees! I also have darkened the shadow on the foreground tree.
Stay tuned!
