I spent last week hiking Isle Royale with my family, and so it was “landscape week” in my journal. Under normal circumstances, you likely wouldn’t be seeing a “sketch-of-the-week” from me following such an endeavor, because almost all of my attempts at landscape thus far have been horrid. But on the second day of the trip I was sitting on the concrete dock at the Moskey Basin campground with my son. He glanced at my sketch in progress, then up at the subject, and joked “Oh! So those two trees are the protagonists?”
And with that joke it clicked: just as I struggled with figures before I pinned down that I needed to start with a single line capturing the gesture, I was struggling with landscape because I needed to start by determining what element (for me) was the “protagonist” in the scene.
I ended up basically happy with all of the sketches from landscape week, but my son felt that this one of the brave little pines at the very edge of Moskey Basin was the best overall:
