Evening Near Mendocino

I made many line sketches on our trip this week up California’s Highway 1 before I caught the flu. Now that I am home and recovering I am adding paint using reference photos that I took with my phone.

Perhaps due to the time gap between drawing and painting, I noticed that my original sketch was too complicated. It was full of small shapes that did not contribute to showing the movement of the sea and night sky. Today I erased some of the original lines before painting to emphasize the rhythm of the big shapes of the sky, sea, and hills.

This is a pastel, gouache and marker sketch on black paper.