Foggy, Snowy Field

Today we got together with our game group and did a pizza and boardgames day. Hannah and I have been getting pretty good at King Arthur Flour's recipe of the year for 2026 - flaky laminated crust pizza, so we all convened to make bake and devour pizzas and play boardgames today. After baking all the pizzas I needed a bit of time to sit and disassociate a bit. So I did most of this digital color sketch of a foggy snowy corn field (it might be a soybean field) that I've had in my inspo folder since I took the photo last winter. There's just such a nice atmosphere to this image that I thought would be fun to try to capture. I love the gradation of hard edges of the weeds in the foreground to this soft, almost lost edges of the tree-line in the background. Same goes for the values in the painting - there's a large value range in the foreground - crisp whites all the way at the bottom, and the darkest cards in the shadows of the weeds, and almost no value difference between the woods, sky and field at the horizon line. This piece feels like it would make a really nice watercolor painting. Perhaps when I'm done with this mad portrait scramble next week, I'll give it a try as a physical painting.

-ZR