Traditional Art - Apocalypse Landscape #10

 For my apocalypse environment based on the Chernobyl virtual tour I first thought about whether to make it into a cityscape or landscape. I created quick prep sketches to get an idea of a composition, thinking about what tones would best represent a destroyed environment. I felt a cityscape could make for some interesting shapes when it came to desolate buildings and such but knowing that this piece would be in colour I decided a landscape would be better because I felt I could introduce more colours that way.

I started my landscape by doing a quick sketch of the whole environment, framing off a portion of the page to ensure the scene remained proportional. I wanted to include a water tank like I had in one of my sketches and keep that as a primary focal point. Knowing that would be using fairly muted colours like browns and greys, I made sure to have some foliage around it so that it was clearly visible and didn’t just fade and blend with the greyness of the background.

I chose to use colouring pencils as my dry medium but when starting to colour, it was bit tricky to get the values I wanted for the scene since I had limited colours to choose from. Much of the colouring process was me having to resort to leaving some values lighter than I would’ve liked to compensate for the lack of colour variation. I feel as though the landscape could’ve been better with more colours to choose from and a better handling on my blending technique between colours but the final piece still turned out to be something I liked. If I’m to do more pieces with coloured pieces in future I will need to practice more on the best ways to approach blending, or perhaps try another medium like pastels.