Two Pictures from Shetland

Here are two sketches I made this summer on Shetland. I've been making an effort, lately, to do more observational drawing and to use colours. These drawings were made with colour pencils. In the first one, I used them sparingly and focused more on lines, but with the drawing of my hand I really went for it, chosing some very vivid colours. In some places, like the palm, I then covered those reds and oranges with white, which makes the skin look smoother but you can sort of see stuff going on underneath and you can get a really nice feeling of volume and texture that way. I think that what I did here (something I often forget) is that I kept the drawing very lose and crazy and only tightened it up towards the end, with some brown lines and white layers. That goes for the architectural drawing too. It's easy to get really anal about lines when you draw buildings and the result can easily be boring. I'm normally terrible at it but here I just focused on big blocks of colour, and it kind of worked, I think.