This video is about winter in Wales and the graphite sketches that come from looking at the landscape in a stripped-back season. Without strong colour, the eye starts to notice shape, weight, distance, and the soft changes between light and dark.
Graphite is a good medium for winter. It is simple, portable, and sensitive. A pencil drawing can hold the grey of a sky, the line of a path, the slope of a field, or the dark edge of trees without needing to explain too much.
These sketches are part of the same practice as my paintings. They help me slow down and understand a place before colour enters the work again. Sometimes a graphite sketch remains a finished drawing; sometimes it becomes the beginning of a larger landscape painting.
If you like graphite drawing or Welsh winter landscapes, this is a look at the colder part of the process: fewer colours, more edges, more looking before anything useful happens.