In the woods

 

This year is a year for mushrooms, they appear everywhere and most of all in beautiful pictures on tv shows. So of course I am inspired to paint and draw mushrooms and this time I have been looking in my archives of reference pictures.

The picture for this mixed media drawing was made several years ago and I still did not paint from it, because the mushroom (I have been looking for its name, but I still have no idea what kind of mushroom it is) is grey, almost translucent. It reminds me a bit of a jellyfish with the lines going to the middle and the semi-transparent quality of the hood.

Then I remembered I could do a drawing with my Conté Sketching Crayons, as there is a grey one in my set. I have added some more colours from the set to this drawing and I tried to add some more colours with my Graphitint pencils and a Tinted Charcoal pencil. After spraying fixative, the colours of the pencils dominated the grey hood, so I added more Conté to it, fixative again and repeated these steps one more time. The Graphitint is more dominant than I expected,  I have learned a lesson for the next time. 

The forest floor, with branches, some feathers and pine needles is only suggested here by layering Conté Crayons (smudging them with my fingers) and pencils until I had the desired result. 

This time I worked on coloured cardboard, this is a heavy paper and I have chosen a small size, because I had only one mushroom as my subject. For a group of mushrooms I would have chosen a larger sheet of paper of course.

The information about the paper, pencils and crayons I worked with, and the availability of this drawing can all be found in the link at the 'Galerie' page of my website www.jannekesatelier.webs.com