I love, love, love going for a long drive through the Texas Hill Country and I love it even more when I stumble on a great little roadside diner. This is called Mac and Ernie's Roadside Eatery in Tarpley, Texas and it was featured on diners, drive-ins and dives. So I had to try the featured burger and it was quite tasty. There's a great outdoor seating area in the back under some gigantic oaks and it's just really beautiful, really, really peaceful. Oh, well, hey. I know, I know, but she's upset that we weren't sharing, but not my place. Anyways, I've been drawing a lot of trees lately and I loved this big guy that I was sitting underneath and I didn't record myself actually drawing it in the restaurant, but here you can see the finished product. I'm kind of into the gigantic trunk slightly because I'm just surrounded by these very young new trees and these drawings are really about communing and the energy of the time in the place more than trying to capture what I'm seeing. The loop I drove this day had a lot of really hilly areas with hairpin turns that I couldn't record on and a few little flat areas like this definitely passed some sites like this which are not uncommon in the Texas Hill Country. I didn't even know what it was until I came home and looked it up, but it wasn't too keen on me recording so I didn't bother them too long. They're fun to look at though. This is a really picturesque spot between Vanderpool and Medina that has a clear safe space to pull off and so I set up a little chair and did my thing. I'd found some oil pastels that I had bought years ago for my kids and I decided to shake things up a little bit and try using those on top of some paper that I've been like whenever I have extra watercolor or ink I just have been doing a wash on top of some scrap paper and then tucking that into my plane air kit so that's what I use. It's not my usual medium so I wasn't feeling totally comfortable with it but I do think it's good to try other things every now and then it's helpful to kind of get you out of your normal bubble I guess and whenever I do try different materials I kind of veer more towards realism at first until I'm sort of getting a feel for it so that's kind of I think why this particular drawing like the in product has a little more of that going on but you know it's definitely very different than the wet on wet thing and these colors are straight out of a crayon box so like I said I bought these for my kids but you know it's fine it's fine it did the trick and I'm playing around with new materials so here we go I made one more stop to draw at a small roadside park along the Medina River and instead of giant oaks it was giant cypress trees which are just as magical and oh my god let me just those reflections it's beautiful I think when people who aren't from Texas think of this place it's like it's going to be flat it's going to be desert it's going to be cowboys it's going to be politics and you know not even going to go there but there's a lot a lot more there's a lot of nuance there's a lot of softness there's a lot of beauty and just simplicity and quiet and majesty of these amazing cypress trees I just love them so much there was a really great cypress need that had this fantastic sculptural form and kind of matched my shadow and I decided to draw that so I set up among the roots and did another oil pastel drawing on tinted paper so here you can kind of see my stash that I have and since I did kind of a greenish one I went for yellow and there were you couldn't really see it in the video but there were a lot of yellow wildflowers across the river for me and they were creating kind of a nice reflection and then just the gold in the cypress knee I thought that was a good background so I wasn't loving the sort of straight forwardness of the previous drawing I'm just more inclined towards stylization I guess and so I was going kind of heavy on line work here which made sense with the cypress knee bark and this feels like really drawn out just gonna speed up the video a little bit here so we can get through it and it's not a hour-long video okay back to it so like I said earlier I was just very enamored with the reflections of the trees on the water surfaces and that sort of mirror image that it was creating so I just was kind of going for high contrast with this drawing I guess I don't know I'm not really even thinking about it to that level while I'm doing it I mean I am but it's very ingrained and so it's just sort of happening and I'm looking at what I'm seeing but I'm also reducing it like big time and again a little bit of discomfort with the medium because it's not my usual thing but I did like how this one turned out a lot better than the last one