Drawing Study: Rocks

Been taking a week off from doing artwork and time to get back to work. Several paintings that I'm planning to do involve adding a lot of rocks. So, tonight, I decided to play with just drawing rocks (from memory).

For this drawing, I decided to work on the central set of rocks (middle of the drawing) based extremely loosely on a photographic reference. The main point of using the reference was to observe the angles of the rocks and how the light played on them. From there, I came up with these sets.

The rocks on the cliff edges (to both sides) are more vertical and tend to be flatter. So, assuming that the light was coming from the upper right of the drawing, I made sure that the highlights on the rock was fairly consistent.

The next part of the study is to paint some of the rocks and figure out how to make the sharp corners of them. Possibly a palette knife. Either way, I think that I'm going to need to do a number of smaller thumbnail studies before trying to paint the concept paintings.