Four views of a tree

This chestnut tree in my nextdoor neighbour's back garden was trimmed quite heavily last year, and has just started sprouting new shoots from its truncated branches. As it's still winter, there is no foliage, so that whole plant looks like a spiky stunted edifice at the moment. In the next few weeks it will be transformed and ragin some of its shape, and I'll probably return to it to caputre the transformation.
In this exercise, I did four preparatory drawings taking different views of the tree at different times of the day.

This is the overall result:

The top left was the first attempt, done fairly quickly on a fairly sunny afternoon, and I focused mainly on capturing the overall shape of the branches. Here it is in more detail:

The following morning, the weather was dull, and the tree made quite a dark silhouette with litle detail showing:

I then chose to do an outline of the tree's shape, this time working from the top to the bottom. I started by mapping out where the main bracnhes ended, and the relative positions, and then worked down to the trunk:

Finally, I focused on a section of the trunk, and really looked at the shape of the grain of the bark, and the imperfections and scars on the surface of the trunk:

House with solar panels

This scene was done from an upstairs window of my house, looking across at the pair of semi-detached houses opposite.

Since I was quite high up, the lines of the gutter were virtually straight (rather than showing strong perspective) from my viewpoint. The tree is in the front garden of the house with the solar panels, while the lampost is close to my house.

I did the initial outlines quite quickly in pencil, and then changed to a black drawing pen to do the detail.

Exercise - perspective in the front hallway

This was a quick pencil sketch of my front hallway, which has lots of items (pictures, doorways, rugs) leading to a front door with two glazed panels.

It was a dull day outside, but still the contrast of light from outside created strong lines around the door. I didn't use a ruler for any of the straight lines, and I also didn't create a horizon to get the perspective right.

So it was all done from eye. By using a horizon and getting the parallel lines to meet on the line, I'd have got a more accurate image... but this was just a starter.

Exercise: scaling up from a photograph

The aim of this exercise was to find a scene with an interesting subject in the middle distance. I finally found this scene in a local park. which I think is an Edwardian shelter, and photographed it with the railings framing the foreground of the image.

This is the photo:

I then marked up the photo with a grid and scaled it up to an A2 sheet of paper.

I used a mixture of soft graphite pencil, and then watercolour pencils to do most of the picture. I did apply water to some parts of the picture just to give a softer look to the colour. I finally used a black marker pen to do the central shelter in order to bring it out.
The sky was virtually white and so I've left that blank.

Here's my version:

Exercise: drawing clouds

When I told my grand-daughter I was learning to draw clouds, she said "They're easy, Grandad, I'll show you."

Like her, I thought clouds would be easy to draw, but it's far from the case; trying to capture the shape, texture and colour of clouds has been very challenging, especially with the limited colour palette of a pencil box.

I knew that John Constable is credited with being one of the first artists to really draw clouds from life and so I looked at some of his work for inspiration.

This sketch of his shows how he managed to capture the shape and different tones of a cloud in a very short space of time. The result is almost like a painting-by-numbers approach with just three or four different pencil patterns to represent different tones.



I tried a similar approach with a couple of early efforts, with a sky filled with wispy clouds:

Since clouds move and change quite fast, I took a series of photographs, and then tried to convey some puffy cumulo nimbus clouds, using the same approach as Constable, with pencil:

Finding it rather hard to get any real sense of clouds just in pencil, I moved on to using colour mixing a variety of media including oil pastels, pastel pencils and even watercolour pencils.

This was the result, first scanned as a b/w image:

And then in colour. I used pastel pencils, then graphite pencils, then some oil pastels to get some of the difficult colours. Clouds tend to be quite a flat grey, but with a bluish/purplish tinge.

On the whole this has been a difficult, but illuminating experience. I have to say I pay much closer attention to clouds now. I've realised that they change radically depending on time of day and the position of the sun. With the sun behind them, the clouds appear dark, with bright white edges; near dusk, the sun shines below the clouds creating the typical 'red sky' effect, with the shadows on top of the clouds.