A Winter Stream in the Adirondacks

My weekend project was this charcoal drawing of a stream near Lake Piseco, in the southern Adirondacks. We had stopped by a culvert in the road where the stream passed underneath it, and I got out and took some photographs in both directions; that was late January and the stream was flowing strongly -- which seemed unusual for that time of year, no doubt a consequence of the warming climate. Lake Piseco is a big body of water, and normally is a haven for ice fishing, but we saw very few ice fishing shanties out on the ice this year.

There were lots of challenging aspects to this drawing, from depicting the conifer forest in the background, ringed by shorter bare shrubs, to the mounded snow and trees reflecting in the flowing water. I simplified the scene from what it actually looked like, where there was snow on every branch, and the brush and twigs coming out of the snow seemed much more complicated and detailed. This little 38-second time-lapse shows how the drawing evolved:

Over the past couple of days I made a short demo video just about drawing the conifers in the background, in response to a request made on the previous video post -- I'll post that tomorrow or the next day.