Seeing the Unseen: Cut-a-way Views
During our recent Sonoran Desert Field Arts Bootcamp in Aravaipa Canyon, I watched artist Patricia Larenas draw a beautiful landscapito in her journal and turn it into an interactive feature by overlaying a door that the viewer opens to reveal the landscape.
Magic! I immediately thought of many other ways to incorporate cut-a-way panels: day sky / night sky; tree trunk / woodpecker hole-nest; creek or ocean surface / underwater life; gopher or ant mount / underground chambers; snow surface / animal tunnels or stream . . . it’s really endless, the only limit your imagination.
The technique and tools are pretty simple, too. In my field bag I keep a plastic-handled scalpel with cover (or search for “bread lame tool”), a small vial of PVA glue (= Elmer’s glue), and a small glue-spreading brush (from the bookmaking arts).
Create your “top” or “visible” view first, keeping in mind any space you need to leave for what you envision for the “underside” or “unseen” view, which you complete on the next page. Eyeball marker points to align the scenes up and pencil them in so you stay within scale and match features.
When finished with both drawings, lightly sketch with pencil the door/s you want to open, and also mark the hinges (the uncut part) so you don’t get over-enthusiastic and cut through them.
Once you triple-check the door placement and cut lines, place a piece of thin cardboard (such as from a cereal box; I keep a 9x6 piece in the back of my journal) between the pages, and use the scalpel to cut your door/s.
Finally, spread a thin layer of PVA glue on the back of the first page and carefully press to the second page, aligning the corners and smoothing everything flat. Let dry. Then I cover the cut-a-way part with a sheet of paper and lightly spritz the back side of the doors with water, close them, and then place my Perspex Palette on top of that, and a weight on top of the palette and let dry. This helps ensure the door lays flat again.
I would love to see your results if you try creating cut-a-ways for the “unseen” views!
Turn on the sound for soothing creek burbling and bird calls.
Saguaro snowy scene 90-second tutorial
It's fun and easy to make quick "landscapitos" using just a few colors + white gouache. I laid a duo-tone sky / background using Manganese Blue Hue graded into Indanthrone Blue. Spatter with white gouache while damp. Let dry. Add your trees or cactus (I used Indanthrone mixed with Aureolin Yellow to make dark green), making the ones in the distance smaller and fainter. Add smaller shrubs if desired, with a dark color (Indanthrone), for contrast. Add snow with thick white gouache, then a few snow flurries on top, and voilá! A snowy landscapito! [Sound on for cheery holiday music!]
Around the World in 80 Trees: Asia Part 2 [Free workshop]
Inspired by Jonathan Drori’s wonderful books Around the World in 80 Trees and Around the World Plants, we’re going to travel around the globe by region and sketch interesting, weird, iconic, or beautiful trees and tree-like plants.
No. 6: Asia, Part 2
What you’ll need: a multi-media sketchbook or a strip map (see the versions I did for the other sessions, links below), pen and / or pencil for our base drawings, and then watercolor or colored pencil to quickly bring them to life.
TIP: I used a strip of heavy watercolor paper folded into four squares to create an “accordion” booklet to record my trees (8 total, 4 on each side).
Prepwork: have on hand a simple outline map of Europe so you can sketch location points for each species.
When: Saturday, January 21, 2023 at 10 am Arizona time (use a time converter to make sure you pick the right time for your time zone: https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html )
HOW: Zoom link. This session is free but for security, registration is required. Sign up > HERE <.
Around the World in 80 Trees: ASIA! [Free workshop]
Inspired by Jonathan Drori’s wonderful books Around the World in 80 Trees and Around the World Plants, we’re going to travel around the globe by region and sketch interesting, weird, iconic, or beautiful trees and tree-like plants.
No. 5: Asia
What you’ll need: a multi-media sketchbook or a strip map (see the versions I did for the other sessions, links below), pen and / or pencil for our base drawings, and then watercolor or colored pencil to quickly bring them to life.
TIP: I used a strip of heavy watercolor paper folded into four squares to create an “accordion” booklet to record my trees (8 total, 4 on each side).
Prepwork: have on hand a simple outline map of Europe so you can sketch location points for each species.
When: Saturday, November 19, 2022 at 10 am Arizona time (use a time converter to make sure you pick the right time for your time zone: https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html )
HOW: Zoom link. This session is free but for security, registration is required. Sign up > HERE <.
Around the World in 80 Trees series – Part 4, Europe
Inspired by Jonathan Drori’s wonderful books Around the World in 80 Trees and Around the World Plants, we’ve been traveling around the globe by region and sketch interesting, weird, iconic, or beautiful trees and tree-like plants. We just finished Part 4: Europe! Please visit the Tutorials page to view this session, or parts 1 to 3 (North America, South America, and Africa): https://www.exploringoverland.com/field-arts-tutorials#virtualfield
Chroma Sonorensis: Making ink from mesquite tree sap
Huge old mesquite tree on the Verde River in Arizona; from the US Forest Service publication Riparian Research and Management - Past present and future Volume 2
Drawing and painting in your journal with locally foraged wild pigments is deeply satisfying—true place-based art.
As part of my Chroma Sonorensis project, I began experimenting with making ink from mesquite tree sap—and I’m really pleased with the results. The mesquite (Prosopis velutina) is endemic to North America and an iconic tree in the Southwestern United States (though it’s now an invasive species plaguing nearly every continent). I grew up with mesquites, and especially love the huge old trees that are the remnants of the once-great bosques (Spanish for forest) that lined our now-dry rivers a hundred-plus years ago.
I gathered strips of bark from a tree in my back yard, where a lot of dark brown sap had leaked after a pruning cut last year. I soaked the bark in distilled water in a glass bowl, and then simmered it over a pan of barely boiling water for about four hours, until the liquid was very, very dark. I filtered the pigment solution through a paper coffee filter (several times, using clean filters each time). I then put the solution into the stainless steel pot and reduced it by at least four times by slow simmering, until only about half a cup of liquid was left—being very careful not to let it get to a rolling boil or burn. Finally, I cooled the liquid and added a very few drops of vinegar, and then decanted into small vials and a glass jar, adding a clove to each container (to help prevent mold).
The ink is a beautiful, rich brown that flows perfectly and adheres easily to the paper. Normally when making plant-based inks you must add a “binder” such as gum arabic (just a little) so the color adheres to the paper. But because this ink is made from sap it has a “built in” binder in the form of the slightly sticky sugars that occur in phloem (one of the heartwood tissue components in trees).
You can try making your own ink from lots of different sources. Berries can produce lovely inks though their color may fade or change color entirely over time. Dark-brown and black inks were historically made from plant-based sources of tannin, or tannic acid. Experiment! Try any tree sap that shows color, walnut hulls (not the nuts but the green fuzzy outer covering of the hard nut), and oak galls, which are not tree fruit but a nodule created by the tree in response to a little wasp (there are many species that do this) that lays its eggs in the oak leaf tissue and the tree actually forms the hard shell in response to the invasion. The baby wasps actually develop inside the round gall. You can read more about iron gall ink here, along with a good description of the ancient recipes for ink, including why vinegar is used.
Field Arts Workshop: Landscapitos - Little Drawings, Big Impact (FREE online)
Adding small landscape drawings and paintings to your journals creates a wonderful sense of place, greatly enhancing your pages. John Muir Laws calls them “Landscapitos!” Don’t be intimidated! These are fast, fun, and addictive.
On Saturday, February 5 I’ll take you on two or three explorations using my Virtual Field Trip technology; I’ll walk you through how I choose a scene to sketch, how I “edit” down the view so I’m not overwhelmed, and how I quickly map out the drawing using big shapes. Then we’ll add some beautiful watercolor.
Have your journal and pencil or pen with waterproof ink handy, along with your favorite watercolors. Have you seen my new Earth Palette? These are especially fun paints for landscapitos.
When: Saturday, February 5
Length: 1 hour, 30 minutes
Start time: 10 am Mountain / 9 am Pacific / GMT - 7
(Having trouble figuring out time zones?Use this calculator: https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html)
Format: online via Zoom (you will receive a log-in link)
Cost: free
Access: To protect your privacy and security online and for us to find out how many students will be attending, registration is required. Please use this link HERE.
Skyscapito Meet-up No. 7 – Favorite sky painters from art history
Luke Howard, late 1800s
Eric Sloane, 1950
Inspired by and in collaboration with Journaling with Nature’s Bethan Burton, this is our own informal “Skyscapito Appreciation Society!” A “skyscapito” is a small skyscape we create in our nature journals, similar to the “little landscapes” John Muir Laws loves to create.
Join me (Roseann Hanson, of the Field Arts Institute), Bethan, and Deborah Conn as we host an hour (or a little more, if needed) of sharing our sky passions — Friday, February 25 at 4 pm MST.
THIS IS NOT A WORKSHOP! It's a casual meetup of like-minded sky aficionados, nature journalers, and field sketchers.
This session we'll be sharing favorite examples of skies from art history (or present!).
Find one image to share and be prepared to briefly say why you love it and if you dare, try an example of that type of sky and share that, too!
FREE but registration is required, for security reasons. SIGN UP HERE
WHEN: Friday, February 25 at 4 pm Mountain USA time
LENGTH: About an hour
This is Arizona time, which is the same as Mountain Time USA right now. Please use a timezone converter app to make sure you have the right time!
Mnemonic for Metadata Reminders
NOTE: This is an excerpt from my forthcoming new book (February 2022) Master of Field Arts, the “master’s degree” workshop-in-a-book will be a companion to Nature Journaling for a Wild Life.
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Our main tool for field arts is the field journal, and there are three essential elements to its success. Fortunately each is straightforward, albeit critical to complete if your journal is to reach its potential as a reliable record for expeditions, overland travel, or scientific studies. All engineering and research laboratories have stringent guidelines for keeping lab journals—even in the digital age, written lab and field notes are preferred from a legal perspective for patent applications or peer reviews. Likewise if you are undertaking an expedition of historical or scientific significance, your field notes will be used to measure and verify your outcomes.
The essential elements are: metadata, field data, and regimen. For this post, I’m going to focus on metadata: what is it, why it’s important, and what are the best metadata to include in field notes.
Metadata
“Meta” is a Greek prefix that means “along with” or “self-referential.” Metadata is data that goes along with other data to help organize or categorize it, which makes tracking and working with it not only easier but also determines whether it will be considered an anecdote or a fact. In a field journal, metadata establishes:
These are essential for future use, by you or other naturalists, scientists, and explorers. Good field notes are worth their weight in gold to an explorer or field scientist—you can never be sure what you will need in the future when writing up your discoveries or applying for funding or an award. In short, you can never have too much metadata. Useful metadata includes:
Metadata is usually placed first in a field journal—for me, the act of drawing grids and looking up and writing down various data is a trigger for my brain to start focusing on observation and recall, and it literally “warms up” my hand through the act of drawing lines and circles and symbols (see examples above and below).
Another metadata component that is important for fieldwork and expeditions is to list your team members and their affiliations and contact information.
I love to use official NOAA weather symbols in my field notes metadata; for an in-depth discussion and lots of charts of symbols, see my Weather Data 101 tutorial at https://www.exploringoverland.com/constantapprentice/2020/6/11/metadata-101-weather
Layout Strategies for Beautiful Pages available on recording
Now posted to my Field Arts Tutorials page, you can enjoy the workshop on getting over design angst using design principles and an organic approach. You can access the recording, downloads, and sample images here:
https://www.exploringoverland.com/field-arts-tutorials-list/2021/11/14/layout-strategies
Tennis star Arthur Ashe famously said: “There is a syndrome in sports called ‘paralysis by analysis.’” The same is true for art. A study published in the Journal of Neuroscience found that the prefrontal cortex—which is housed in the cerebrum—is the part of the brain responsible for planning, executive function, and working memory. Further, the findings showed that overactivity in the prefrontal cortex can interfere with brain processes necessary to perform fluidly; simply put, this can cause people to “choke,” whether you are an athlete or an artist.
This fun and inspiring workshop is going to focus on how we “loosen up” and let go of Type-A-style planning so that our pages become beautiful in an organic way, enhanced by our science-oriented data—which is the most beautiful thing of all.
We’ll also have some fun with a few tools and tricks: a caliper to measure proportions (which happen to coincide with the “Golden Mean” . . . don’t worry we’ll cover that, too!) and a fun protractor for making perfect circles.
Field Arts Skills Workshop: Elegant Ink [FREE online]
Join me for a fun online workshop August 21 celebrating the art of elegant ink in our sketchbooks. While I do love color in my journal, I also love the beauty of well-wrought pen sketches.
We’ll cover types of pens and inks (from ballpoint to fountain pens, including the pluses and minuses of the types); practice mark-making and values; and work on a couple of different types of sketches using one image to create each, so we can see how different styles of linework each produce a different “feel” on your pages.
When: Saturday, August 21, 2021
Length: 2 hours
Start time: 9:00 am Arizona time / Pacific
(Having trouble figuring out time zones?Use this calculator: https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html)
Format: online via Zoom (you will receive a log-in link)
Cost: free
Access: To protect your privacy and security online and for us to find out how many students will be attending, registration is required. Please use this link HERE.
Making a cyanometer to measure sky moisture through color
I love simple field arts tools for my kit, and a recent discovery (thanks to our Skyscapito Appreciation Society comprising weather and cloud nerds), is the cyanometer. Encompassing the word for the primary color blue, “cyan,” it is a simple manual tool for measuring a meteorological phenomenon.
The cyanometer was developed by Swiss meteorologist and geologist Horace-Bénédict de Saussure in 1789 to measure the blueness of the sky and thus its moisture (and particle) content. The paler the sky, the more water vapor is present in the atmosphere; clouds are dense with moisture and the blue visible spectrum we see in the sky is scattered in all directions by the water in these pockets of condensing moisture, making them appear white. The darker values mean there is less water vapor so more of the pure blue spectrum is visible (and it’s most blue straight overhead). This scattering of light is known as Mie scattering (or Raleigh scattering, depending on the atomic particle size).
Saussure’s original cyanometer (left, which resides at the Bibliothèque de Genève, Switzerland) had 53 values of Prussian blue. It was held up and compared to the color of the sky to select a value. Alexander von Humboldt used the cyanometer on his voyages and explorations in the Americas in the late 1700s.
Another use for this tool would be to use it to match blue values from the sky to your notebook for getting the hues just right for different parts of a sky.
You can make your own cyanometer, choosing a blue shade that best approximates your typical regional sky. A compass and ruler are helpful to create the circle and partitions. I made mine to fit into a pocket in my journal, so it is about 5.5 inches wide.
Create a disk using a pencil and compass. Use a ruler to divide into 16 spaces. Note that I added a third circle to demarcate a space for the scale, which starts at 0 for white.
To reserve a white line between values I added wax lines using waxed paper scribed with a pencil.
I chose cobalt blue, mixing a very pale wash for the first layer, covering 1–15.
First wash is very pale. Once dry, add another wash starting with #2 and ending with #15. Continue drying, adding layers (3–15, 4–15, etc.), until halfway, when the values are saturated.
At that point, begin adding a wash of dark blue such as indanthrone, eventually ending with pure dark. I used a white colored pencil to enhance the numbers and lines in the dark values.
Cyanometer in use, showing a #6 value sky, which tracks well with the 42% humidity that day.
Bethan Burton, of Journaling with Nature, posted a short video of her process for making a cyanometer, which is a little different from mine. Both work really well.
You can also use this wheel to match colors in the sky to a painting in your notebook!
The next meet-up of the Skyscapito Appreciation Society is Friday, August 13 at 3 pm Pacific time, and we will be practicing making cyanometers. Details and registration link is on the Skyscapito page (link above) or in the Events and Workshops area of this website.
Skyscapitos Appreciation Society – First online meetup!
Inspired by and in collaboration with Journaling with Nature’s Bethan Burton, we’re launching our own informal “Skyscapito Appreciation Society!” A “skyscapito” is a small skyscape we create in our nature journals, similar to the “little landscapes” (landscapitos) John Muir Laws loves to create.
Join me (Roseann Hanson, of the Field Arts Institute), Bethan, and Deborah Conn as we host an hour (or a little more, if needed) of sharing our skyscapitos and our favorite colors for sky-making.
We will be doing this semi-regularly so we can all get better at this difficult subject!
This will be interactive, not a lecture: we will each bring one or two skyscapitos from our journals and share with you what paints we used, and how we went about the process.
We would like you to do the same — you don’t HAVE to but we would greatly encourage you to!
FREE but registration is required, for security reasons.
WHEN: Friday, July 16 at 4 pm Pacific (which is 9 am on the July 17th on Australia’s east coast, where Bethan is located!)
WHERE: Zoom (we will record the session and share later if you miss it; register for notifications)
LENGTH: About an hour
TO PREPARE: Bring a skyscapito or questions about challenges you have!
TO REGISTER: >CLICK HERE<
Making paint and ink from wildfire-sourced charcoal
You can definitely say I’m obsessed with making paint and ink from wild-crafted pigment sources—and this week I went a bit to an extreme, collecting ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) charcoal from the 2020 Bighorn Fire burn area on the Santa Catalina Mountains north of Tucson.
I'm co-producing a webinar on Tucson's Bighorn Fire for UArizona 's Desert Laboratory on Tumamoc Hill, where I'm art and science program coordinator, so I spent some time last week with scientists on the year-old, 119,000-acre burn. [Sign up for the free webinar, on June 2 at 6 pm AZ time: https://environment.arizona.edu/fire-on-the-mountain/]
I just processed the charcoal into paint / ink by grinding it in a small mortar and pestle, then added a little water to make it a medium-thick paint / ink consistency, then added a little bit of binder —about five drops (a mixture gum arabic, ox gall, and honey, but you could use just gum arabic).
Ink made from charcoal, or more commonly soot (the oily residue left on the walls of lamp chimneys, or your fireplace), is known as India Ink or Chinese Ink. Still in use today, it’s often sold in stick form, pressed into beautiful molds depicting scenes or animals; to use, you grind off some pigment and add water. Paint made from soot is called Lamp Black. More on India ink here.
To about 3 tsp. of charcoal powder, add distilled water to a milk-like consistency. Add about 5 drops of binder (see above) and mix well. Mix well.
Paint or write on paper and let dry. Rub a finger over to test for adherence (see test paper below). Add more binder if it smears, more pigment if it’s weak.
It's really special to draw / paint with materials gathered right from a site—truly place-based journaling.
The solution smells just like a forest fire, which is startling and bittersweet.
Journal page, with watercolor sketch done in Bighorn Fire Black, made with Ponderosa Pine charcoal from the 2020 Bighorn Fire in Tucson’s Santa Catalina Mountains.
How to add captioning to your online teaching—for free!
For those of us who teach online, accessibility is an important service for our attendees. But “real” closed captioning services start at $1.50 per minute (and up drastically from there).
Here, I share several tips for providing free captioning for hearing-impaired viewers when presenting on Zoom.
First up is Powerpoint, by Microsoft—huge props to Microsoft for pioneering this excellent service embedded in presentation software. Apple isn’t even close to providing this yet. All you need to do is turn on “Always Use Subtitles” under Slide Show settings and choose your language. Once the show is playing, the captions keep up really well.
and
Webcaptioner.com a free web-based captioner. You must use Google Chrome to take advantage of the API for voice transcription. Donations are suggested and well worth it if you use this service.
The only thing I have not yet figured out is free captioning for spoken portions of Zoom presentations when you are not using a slide show or screen-share.
Check out my tests in the video—I think you’ll be impressed!
Using the clear Perspex Palette-Easel to Make a 3D-Cube Landscape
I really love John Muir Laws’ “3-D” landscape cubes — in which you envision taking a giant cutter and pulling a cube out of a landscape, showing the sliced edges and details such as soil and creeks and roots (see here and here for examples). Laws details them in his wonderful book The Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling.
But I struggled with doing these complex drawings “live” in the field. Where to place the cube, how to envision placing the elements correctly. I always drew mine from photos, then actually printed them and sketched the cube over the photo, or used Photoshop to put a cube over the digital photo.
Earlier this month I introduced the new clear Perspex Palette-Easel (with magnet strip) and now I have the perfect tool to make all the cubes I want! Here’s a recent one I drew in the field, in southern Arizona’s Dragoon Mountains, showing the step-by-step. The whole thing, including watercolor, took about 40 minutes.
Start by drawing a cube shape in your notebook:
Then, draw or trace the same shape on your palette with the dry-erase marker. It’s important that they are the same proportions, so that’s why I just traced mine:
Now, hold the palette at arms-length in front of you, closing one eye, and trying it on different views.
I wanted to include some boulders “spilling” off one side, and show the grassland and trees and roots as part of the “slice,” so I settled on this view of part of the hillside.
Hint: hold the palette with your thumb on the lower corner; mark a tree or rock that is right at or behind the thumb and use that marker to anchor the palette each time you hold it up. You need to be able to get the same view each time you lift up the palette to study the scene as you draw the landscape on your paper, in pencil:
It may take several tries to get everything placed where you want it. I started with the “back” of the cube, sketching the far hillside and then then nearer rocky slope with the spires, then moved to the “front” where I sketched the slope (had to do it twice to get it right), with the edge of the grassland where I wanted the “slice” into the earth. Then the boulders spilling off the right, and then finally the details on the left, completing the landscape by bridging the front and back of the scenes.
Hint: don’t get too detailed, this is a “landscapito” sketch, so keep it loose and fun.
Next: carefully ink the drawing. Remember NOT to ink in the cube lines in the center, just along the bottom and sides, stopping where any landscape detail ends and the sky begins.
Note that I inked the lower right “corner” of the grassland slice, and added the moon above.
Once the ink is dry, erase the pencil lines with a kneaded eraser (which won’t leave eraser-bits all over the paper).
And now the fun part, add watercolor!
Don’t forget to make the details that are farther away (like the hill in the background) less distinct (I used a warm blue and darker blue-greens to push it back).
If you want to try this unique and fun way to represent a landscape, you can order your own Clear Perspex Palette-Easel with Magnet strip here.
Enjoy!
You can also try the 3D cube view on nearby subjects. This is a slice into a large boulder at Tohono Chul Park in Tucson. I used the perspex palette-easel to isolate the view, and then made sure to include the ground underneath and a little rodent burrow and plant roots.
New Virtual Field Trip – Mountains and Mesas – recording posted
Join me on a virtual field trip from Moab, Utah, to Aspen, Colorado, all along backcountry roads through some of North America’s most spectacular scenery as the colors begin turning fiery yellow and red.
Sketch along or just observe, l narrate as I go to demonstrate why I choose to focus on what subjects and how to quickly capture them in your field notebooks and nature journals.
And in this trip, I introduce an all-new virtual field experience using 360-degree views and embedded videos and images, so you can explore the same trip, at your own pace, and sketch and take notes as you go.
New Tutorial: Adding pages to my handmade leather journal
I have just added a short tutorial in which I demonstrate how I lace pages into my simple leather journal using leather shoelace. I've been using this system for over 20 years and it is inexpensive and versatile, allowing me to archive my pages in three-ring binders.
I also include links for more tutorials on how I made my journal and my Minimalist Stand-Up Sketching Kit, as well as printable downloads for weather data to add to your journal.
How to render 3D block maps
Cartography is one of the oldest field arts—many ancient petroglyphs might actually be maps (there are several at Twyfelfontein in Namibia).
Here is a step-by-step pictorial on how to render a cool 3D map. I did this one from a photo after a visit to Cave Creek in southeastern Arizona's Chiricahua Mountains. The biggest challenge is pulling the "box" out of the 2D image and envisioning the "cut away" part in a way that works in a 3D cube. Thanks to John Muir Laws for the tutorial in his excellent Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling.
Study your photo or live landscape and decide where you want to pull out your 3D box. I wanted to be sure to depict the creek, especially the whimsical spillage off the box (idea stolen from Jack Laws). Getting the landscape right in the box is the hardest part, and you will probably have to do 4 or 5 tries before it feels right. That's how many it took me on this one! I used this photo for inspiration; from the Friends of Cave Creek Canyon (FOCCC) on Facebook, by Steve Wolfe.
After studying your photo (or live landscape) and deciding where to pull out your 3D box, use pencil to draw a rectangle on your page. with all the corners and "bottom" included.
Using pencil still, sketch in the upper corners and limits of the landscape within the box. You can see I drew the right-most upper corner too high and fixed it later. Then I added the general creek location and the background.
When I was happy with the placement of the landscape elements, I drew over the main parts in pen.
After the pen dries, erase the pencil lines that marked the structure of the box. Then go back with pencil and add details; I roughed in the rock spires, the slopes, where I wanted to make the darker patches of vegetation, and a few symbols for habitat types. When happy, I finalized in loose pen sketching, keeping the marks fairly light.
The final step was adding the watercolor, making sure to make the farthest mountains darker and warmer blue in tone so they feel like they are receding (instead of making them green or cooler blue). Don't go crazy on the details for something this size and this simple.
I decided to add the clouds and hawk as a fun whimsy.