Drawing 1, Part 3: Exercise 2

More Trees

We were asked to either draw a single tree, spending our time on observing and representing, or draw a groups of trees.

I chose to sketch the huge tree in our communal garden (I live in a flat). The tree is right outside my window, but I sat on the grass in the garden, and observed the tree as I sketched. It was a sunny day, so there were plenty of highlights and shadows.

I decided to use a 0.5 fineliner drawing pen on A2 paper.

I first drew the trunk and branches, and added directional lines on them. This was to give them form.

Tree trunk

I then used a squiggling, scribbling technique for the foliage, first adding sparser areas for the highlights, and dense scribbles for the shadows.

Scribbled foliage

But the dense areas didn’t look dark enough or give enough contrast, so i finely crosshatched the darker areas to add more shadow.

I was very happy when I finished this tree! It took me 3 hours, in all. The sense of jubilation when I made that last squiggle!!!

The finished tree

I am happy with the outcome. There is contrast and variation in tone, the tree has movement and direction, and the foliage looks dense, which it was in reality. It also has the illusion of texture.

I think that pen was an interesting choice of medium and I was able to capture a lot of detail, but I feel it was much more labour intensive than other media. I enjoyed working with it for this project, however.