Home Is Just Over the Laguna Mountains
After a month on the road the sight of the Laguna Mountains in the distance made me so happy. As you drive west from El Centro the mountains first come into view as a faint blue smudge and within 30 minutes transform into an immense purple structure. The larger the mountains became, the more my excitement grew.
During our trip to Prince Edward Island and back I sketched many views of the road ahead and wanted to end our trip with one more. The challenge of sketching while driving is that nothing holds still and it is easy to get a mess instead of a coherent view. I work around this by selecting some big structures of the scene and then use these to organize the sketch.
Today I began by outlining the road and the smaller blue mountain on the left. It made an interesting curve down across the page and gave places for the sky, vegetation and cars. I worked on these smaller sections, one by one, by sketching whatever was in front of me at the moment. I saved the sky for last. When I went to work on it the mountains appeared much larger and much more purple than when I began the sketch 20 minutes earlier. I decided to add a second layer of purple mountains using some of the space that the sky was going to go in. Then to connect the new mountains to the whole picture I put some of the purple color onto the highway.
This is a pastel and gouache sketch with some editing in Procreate.
