Giving credit where is due.

Pencil and watercolor on Laloran sketchbook 5 in x 5 in

 There are some benches along the Dupage river where I live. We stopped there to finish our coffee from this morning after breakfast. It’s a challenge to sketch a view that is fully monochromatic, the grass, the trees and even the river are green, but that is precisely the point, how to make a scene interesting. They say color gets the credit but value does the work. In this instance value gets the credit. There’s really not much color in this scene except for the woman who came to have lunch in one of the benches, and she was wearing muted colors! It just came to my mind that the Midwest region in the United States were I live is fully green in summer or fully white in winter. So sketching is a useful tool where you have the freedom to bring as much color as you want to your surroundings, even if it is on paper, but sometimes you can walk your way around and work with a different approach to make an interesting sketch, like the use of value.