Monday, March 21, 2022

The Mighty 5

Utah is famous for its wonderful landscapes and many of them can be found in "The Mighty 5" national parks there. On Saturday the NYC Urban Sketcher's virtual event took us there. When Jerry and I were driving cross-country we drove through Zion National Park on our way to the Grand Canyon. We didn't have much time to stop...just enough to take a few photos.

When the location was announced I dove right in to the reference photos and downloaded a few from each of the parks. Then it came time to pick one park but I couldn't decide. So I did all 5 of them. Of course these are small sketches...maybe about 4 x 5 inches. I blocked out 5 fairly equal boxes on a large piece of watercolor paper and started drawing. I sketched it all out with an orange micron pen and then started painting with watercolors. I added ink, oil pastels and anything I could grab to intensify the colors of the rocks.






Here is the page as it was composed.



 

6 comments:

  1. These are wonderful, Joan, and they brought back fond memories of Bryce and Zion, which I visited several years. In fact, I have a sketch of that same rock at Bryce... I think it's Queen's Garden?

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    1. Thanks, Tina. I wish we had more time when we were out there. It is hard to get everything in that you want to see.

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  2. If you ever print a postcard of the composed one, ...

    Send me one ;-)

    What a awesome colours it would have.

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  3. Wow! You did the parks justice. I love seeing those places. I like the scenes you selected. Lovely.

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    1. Thanks. I would love to visit each of the parks.

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