Telluride, a small town in western Colorado, is known for its ski slopes and summer festivities. Quiet Telluride evenings are a rarity in the summer, but I snapped a photo of one yesterday and then painted this later. Quiet or not, I did not want to paint in the middle of the road.
Following up on yesterday’s post, I went to another grove of aspen today, this one along the Telluride River Trail. In today’s sketch, some of the aspen trees are much closer to the viewer, giving a stronger sense of being in an aspen grove.
The Ridge Trail near Telluride climbs through a forest of fir trees, aspen, rocks, and meadows. I need to go back and do several more of these until I understand how to convey aspen. Even so, I like this sketch because it captures a bit of the mix of all these elements.
I painted the same scene yesterday, but today’s sketch is from a vantage point about a half-mile further west.
There was a competing view to the view I last posted. If you turn 90 degrees to the south from the spectacular mountains I painted yesterday, there is a meadow edged with cottonwood trees and sandstone cliffs. I had difficulty deciding which scene to paint and had to go back to sketch this one.
We are in the small mountain town of Telluride, Colorado, for a few weeks. This afternoon I biked down the valley a mile or so and sketched for a few hours. As I worked, the sky clouded, and the mountains above the town got quite a bit of rain, although most of it evaporated before it got down to where I was. Looking out into the beauty of distant rain is really special, and this feeling is what I tried to capture in this sketch.
One enjoyable part of a reunion is entertaining each other with a good story. And, since I enjoy sketching my relatives, this works out well for me. This is a sketch from last week that I finalized today. Although it is cartoonish, and I squeezed my relatives onto a small page, I like it because it shows the attention they give each other.
Deliberate Sketching 