Field Studies

I was looking to source imagery for the my illustration of Ted Hughes poem's and so one of the places I have looked is out in nature, seeing this is the subject of Hughes's work. Going on a series of walks in the countryside to observe and see what I could take from the experience was and still is one of the processes I use to source content.

I took a series of photographs.

One of the things that struck me was the shapes of the actual earth in the field. The patterns and textures, browns and greys. One of the concepts I played with was taking strips of the brown earth, cut them into rectangles, and try to extract the shapes of the clods. But on some level this seemed disingenuous to the actual location and perhaps too abstract to use in the final work.

I could use these images as backgrounds for my drawings, the question of backgrounds having been prominent in my latest studies. Potentially these fields of brown could be abstracted and worked up as grounds to draw upon, but would this have the same effect as my abstract drawings of the clods of earth?

Further development

I plan to take more photographs of the landscape and more importantly some of the individual 'characters' within it, such as the trees and birds. These are the elements that at the moment make up the core messages and narrative of my illustration. I may also source the colours from these images, although at the moment I am using black and white.