Sketching the Rural Landscape in Charcoal

 This week my theme for the daily charcoal sketches as been "rural landscapes".  There are plenty of interesting rural scenes to find along the back roads of rural Utah and I've explored and photographed many of them so I had plenty of references for this week's challenge.

I don't remember exactly where I found this barn and old style silo but I'm pretty sure it was somewhere in western Utah County. The composition is a study in contrasting elements, the play of the vertical against the horizontal.

I've now taken so many photos over the years I can't remember where I took all of them.  I'm pretty sure this one was somewhere in Cache County.  This is an interesting arrangement of old wood barns, and backed by my favorite contra-element, trees.  I love the play of natural organic shapes against the geometric hard edges of man made shapes.

This composition is a bit different.  In this case the barn is behind the trees and you don't even see the whole barn which is nestled in rolling hills.

This scene is more intimate than the others, almost a close up of a pole barn or hay shed, I'm not sure what these are commonly called. It's also full of those large size rectangular bales, and backed by lots of trees of course.

If you've ever driven up to the High Uinta Mountains on the Mirror Lake Highway out of Kamas chances are you've seen this barn.  It is just off the highway, is large and covered in rusty corrugated  metal panels, just the kind of thing I love to sketch.

This one is very different from the others.  For one thing I only used a charcoal pencil, no blending, no willow charcoal, no compressed charcoal sticks and no trees which resulted in a much lighter image.  This scene is in Spanish Fork if I remember correctly.  I'm not sure what it is exactly, maybe it used to be some kind of coop, or maybe a granary for a very large operation.  Whatever it is it does not seem to be in use anymore except as a parking lot for grain hauling trucks.