For this exercise I choose a photograph from my Aunts back garden, I used this garden for my previous exercise on 360 studies. 

I worked a3 size on white cartridge paper and used a selection of different pencils. 
The aim of this exercise was to establish a foreground, middle ground and background. 
The photo I chose from my Aunts garden I felt showed this effectively

This way of organising space is characteristic of the French classical painters Nicholas Poussin and Claude Lorrain who in turn influenced the British landscape artist JMW Turner.

Nicolas Poussin Landscape with a Calm, 1650–1651

Claude Lorrain

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Lorrain

JMW Turner Italian Landscape with Bridge and Tower, 1827.

All of these landscape paintings show foreground, middle ground and background effectively, their common traits are mostly blurry backgrounds and much sharper foregrounds. This is something I am going to aim to do in my work. 

I started my drawing by doing a line drawing of my photograph. I then started to add tone to the background, I worked with my softest 6b pencil and and aimed for very little detail, I then worked into my middle ground where I used my 2b pencil and aimed for slightly more detail, then for my foreground I used my sharpest HB pencil, I tried to focus on small detail with this part and used cross hatching and mark making to show tone.

Whilst working I felt like I was succeeding in this exercise, however when I finished I noticed that it wasn’t actually as obvious as I thought or would have liked? One problem I had whilst drawing was I was constantly smudging my work unintentionally with my hand whilst moving my pencil around the paper? I think in future maybe I should rest my hand on a piece of material or paper to try to prevent this smudging? 

I also think in future I need to make the foreground, middle ground and background even more obvious. I believe this drawing would be more effective if I made all of the background completely blurry, then the middle ground less so and the fore ground extremely sharp. 

I feel I have gained a lot from this exercise. Even though my drawing is not as obvious as I would like it to be, my subtle differences do show a small element of space and this is something I will continue to work on and think about in my future work.