Drawing Study: Rocky Beach

Although lately, I've been practicing my painting techniques with still life paintings, I realized that I still need to work on my drawing ability. Since I had several hours tonight and really was not in the mood to start a new painting, decided that I might as well still do some art and practice drawing.

This drawing is loosely based on a photo that I took when my friends and I went out to the San Juan Islands for a kayaking trip. The reason for the drawing/photo was that I liked the rocky shore and the bracketing of the trees with mountains in the background. Formed a nice "L-shape" with the rocks being at the corner point.

When drawing rocky shores, there are two basic techniques that people tend to follow: adhere to the photo/scene religiously or interpret what you see. When doing pen/ink studies of landscapes, I tend to follow the rule that I'm trying to work on with my painting: get the general shapes of the objects down and the rest will take care of itself. So, for the drawing, I worked on just the general shapes of the rocks/trees/mountains and then adjusted them based on general perspective rules (larger objects in the foreground, objects lose focus as they recede, etc).