Brahms' German Requiem Part 2

Completed at last! Its only taken the best part of four months to complete this 70 x 50 cm work on a sheet of 300 gsm Fabriano5 paper. Black ink line drawing with FW acrylic inks for the more painterly aspects.
This is part of the art/music project. This piece is titled "Brahms' German Requiem, second stanza". The stanza is part two of a nine-part work. I intend only to do two of the stanzas. There are other composer's works in the pipeline.
I've already made preliminary sketches for "Elgar's Dream" (Gerontius), Mahler's second symphony "The Resurrection" (Finale) and the Finale of Sibelius' fifth symphony.
As ever the work is intended to portray the imagery that the actual music sounds generates but also the patterns of the written music on the stave

Sketchbook Item.

There hasn't been a lot of time of late to get on with work on the Artech board  but I can always find time to do a bit of sketchbook work of one sort or another, be it little more than doodling an idea or working out how it might look as a finished piece.

Those who have followed these page(s) may have noticed I feature trees and arches, especially ecclesiastical ones. For quite some time now I've been exploring some way of bringing these elements together. After all, ancient sites have evidence of arcades of trees incorporated in them. The lines of pillars and connecting arches in churches and cathedrals seem to have more to them than merely holding the roof up. There may well be theological explanations but I am only looking at the aesthetic aspects.

This sketchbook page shows two pillars replaced as trees. It has something of a surrealist look about it but is a work in progress. There'll be more to come, I'm sure.

This sketch is being worked up into a drawing 50 x 35 cm. currently as a graphite/pencil drawing but other media may be used later on. Who knows where this could lead?

Current Main Project

"German Requiem Part 2" (after Brahms) is progressing, albeit slowly. It is a large-ish work on Fabriano 5 paper, 300 gsm, 70 x 50 cms. and being drawn with micro-pens and several ink glazes being applied means this is not going to be finished in anything like a hurry. Indeed, some thirty or so hours have been spent on it already and there's still a long way to go.

 This is an overall view of the work so far. There are changes and improvements taking place as the thing progresses.

From time to time in all my work where full colour and monochrome are juxtaposed I take a photo (top picture) and desaturate it to check the tone balance. A useful guide for when adjustments need to be made, on paper, not digitally.

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 Some of the trees are half-hidden in the mists and I show this by cross-hatching. The depth of tone varies according to what the lines are made with and some side-experiments are necessary as shown here on this postcard-sized piece. It is seen better when zoomed in.

Here a detail of the tree roots on the right hand side foreground. Again, zooming in will show how the use of technical drawing methods are being applied. It is a far more time-consuming  than freehand but it serves to show more starkly the  differences between the two techniques.
Although the entire piece is an interpretation of the second stanza of Brahms' German Requiem, while doing the cross hatching shown here I was listening the Bach's Cello Suite Nr. 1 which was ideal for filligree lines drawn with a 0.1 micro pen. For the coloured sections I use diluted FW ink and a ruling pen.
Modern acrylic inks with a good old-fashioned traditional pen. I like that.

Sketchbook Pages (5)

Two pages eof studies for the "German Requiem" pictures.