Mobius Meadows Farmstead photos

I spent a few days in the scalding heat at my friend's farm in Vermont. One day we had an hour of rain which was a relief and produced some really cool clouds. I also got to finally try and photograph the hummingbirds and got some OK images.  

Illustration: grange - Möbius Meadows Farmstead

 

The barn at my friend's farm in Vermont. I drew it when it was much smaller. The original barn was hanging off a steep hill and in bad shape. he had it moved to a safer spot and built a much bigger barn around it. This is in the style of my last few colour drawings done in Procreate with maybe a bit more painting detail than the rest. 

illustration: Art, mais 2022 @ Mobius Meadows Farmstead

 I did a trick my friend Mike Luce uses and took some reference photos in a sneaky way so I could do a portrait of my friend Art on his farm in Vermont. Mike does it to get more natural poses and I did it because no one wants to pose for me. I still would like to have done portraits of most of my friends so this stealth method might just get me there, eventually. I wasn't going to show this if he was mad i did it or did not like it and he wasn't and he did - so here it is. 

This is in the style of a portrait I did in December of my friend Keamy and my plan is do all the friend portrait like this. I used Procreate since I can draw anywhere and when I have a few minutes. 

Illustration: granges, Colchester Vermont

 Another one I wanted to use only black line work on. These two barns are down the street from Mobius Meadows farmstead where I like to spend as much time as I can. I see them all the time and never bothered to draw them until now. I thought about putting in the trees behind the barn but I think they would have made the illustration too dense and would have taken the point of interest away. 

Photos: Mobius meadows farmstead

 After not being to the farm for  2 ½ years, I was finally able to go back and see my friends and walk around in the great outdoors. The alpacas still let me pet them which was nice and I was able to take some photos at the farmstead and at the river across the street. 

drawing: barn in Vermont

Still working out the Huion tablet pluses and minuses. Overall it is a great tool and I think this is one of my best drawings in awhile. There is a bug where I have to adjust the parameters at the start of the day of the pen gets stuck in the upper left corner of the screen, which is annoying. Still have to do some colour work and see how that goes.

This was the family barn of a really nice guy, Wade, who gave me a ride to my destination when my Garmin GPS took me hours off course on a really hot day. I took a bunch of reference photos and never got around to doing a drawing until now. I wanted to do the clouds with line work as well, but that looked terrible so back to the old grey scale techniques. To get the natural look I wanted, I went trough my extensive collection of cloud photos and made a little composite to get something that worked with the ink drawing.

abandoned house in Vermont drawing

This was a puzzler for me to figure out how to draw. I picked it for the details, obviously, but what isn't so obvious is how much detail to draw and where. There were several false starts and changes of direction in getting what was in my head into the image.

I work from photos as a rule, have for decades. I don't know many people who can sit in one place for days or weeks to make a drawing or many people who can pose for that period of time keeping the same crazy expression you want on their face. This makes some people think there is no difference between the photo and the illustration which is never the case. So to make the point I decided to show the reference photo.

As you can see I don't draw "every leaf and blade of grass" though it might seem that way at first. Background and foreground elements are often eliminated or changed to fit what I have in mind. In this case I could have gone with a total black silhouette for the rear trees. I decided to go a textured route (but not follow what was there too closely) so the building would stand out more. I also, maybe by laziness, decided that drawing a million weeds and plants was a little much and would take away from the house itself. I also thought of adding reflections in the windows but liked the pure black as a contrast and - maybe-  over emphasized the distance of the broken blinds to add some dimension to the front of the house. I also did not draw some details I thought were distracting like the misc. wires, pipes and weeds hanging off the building.

Finally, I added a light grey wash to the rear trees so darken them further but not lose the details in the texture.



The images can be enlarged by clicking on them and this place was something I saw along my bike trip to Colchester Vermont last fall.