This is a piece I did as a gift for my family that lives in western Michigan. There are countless beautiful beaches on the Michigan west coast, but Holland State Park has always been special for my family. I practically grew up on this beach, watching the sailboats go by. Besides the subject, I like this piece for the many different textures I was able to capture.
My dad, brother and I spent a couple days backpacking through the Shawnee Forest on the River-to-River trail a few years ago. It was a very hot summer, so a lot of the small creeks normally running through the park had completely dried up. We came across one such creek bed around mid day, and stopped for a meal break. I recently did this sketch of the area in graphite.
This is a recent illustration I did in graphite. I found that my process for this piece was different from most of the work I do because of the amount of negative space it required for the snow effects. I ended up throwing away the first two iterations I started because I hadn’t planned for the whitespace properly. But after a couple of practice sketches, I was happy with how the final piece turned out.
