After my research of landscapes and seeing John Constables depiction of clouds, I was rather looking forward to this exercise. My first sketch I tried to outline the shape of the cloud,the sharp lines gave some good definition but felt a little too rigid, I softened up the graphite on my paper, taking a piece of kitchen towel, I worked the medium deep into the papers tooth, I then took a putty rubber and lifted out the lightest areas of cloud. I also used a plastic eraser, to really rub away the marks although this was less accurate. I liked working in reverse taking away the graphite to lighten up my drawing. I tried this approach in my next drawings, trying to use less definite marks.
I decided that my next attempt would have no linear values, I used the edge of my graphite stick across the paper and worked this in with the now heavily graphite infused paper towel, the medium already in the kitchen towels fibres seemed to help it glide but also now served as a drawing tool in its own right. once I had the clouds in place I went about a second layer of tone, now adding darker areas in sweeping movements, trying to get as much kinetic energy in the image as I could. I was hapy with this approach and felt I had a good cloud making method, I repeated the process again and came up with the following image. I really went for a higher contrast this time, I quite liked the result and it certainly has that dark ominous mood I was interested in capturing.
