- March 06, 2025
I got a commission request to do some art of Mount Hood in Oregon that’s about an hour and a half to two hours east of Portland. It is the highest peak in all of Oregon. On a clear day, you can see the mountain from Portland and other parts of Oregon. You can also see Mount Hood from Vancouver and other parts of South Washington State. The process creating this piece was an interesting one. I started out by gridding the piece as I was drawing the outline of the mountain and trees. However, I realized I drew the grid with too soft of a pencil. It took several layers of COPIC markers, POSCA markers, and colored pencils to cover up the grid lines. That added about a week to two weeks extra worth of the piece. But I feel the piece has more vibrant colors as a result of all the layers.
One of my favorite things about this piece is the way I used the white POSCA for the snow. Some of the extra POSCA layers made the trees more green and the sky more blue. The texture of the bottom of the mountain is more pronounced as a result of the extra gray POSCA layer. I wanted the mountain to look like Mount Hood, but like with my other landscapes, I was going for more of an impressionist take. In contract to the original photo, I used three layers of trees at the base of the mountain.
I have posts with links to the process videos of the Mount Hood piece that you can watch:
Colored pencils and POSCA markers and COPIC markers on a 30”x20” illustration board.
March 2025