A week ago I joined a local drawing class as we ventured into a nearby wood and did our best to capture the spirit of the trees around us. Today I hooked up to the last of these classes with the aim of branching out (joke!) into using colour as a means to record the woodland.
Unlike last time we warmed up by looking into the canopy and observing how branches and leaves high up might make sense on paper. The immediate problem is that foreshortening reduces even the tallest trunk and, without any external indications of scale, it's challenging to illustrate this effect. In the end I settled on simply trying to draw the tree as it appeared from my position close to its trunk:
Unfortunately I think that the result just comes across as a tree drawn from the side but never mind - I like the effect of the leaves blending together and the negative spaces between the branches. Actually considering the branches a few of them blend reasonably subtly into the canopy but others are rather more abrupt and I think that it's important to get this detail right.
The second piece required us to look down at the floor and to pick something that we liked. Some people chose to focus on a single leaf, in detail, but I decided to try and retain the broad wash of colour supplied by leaves, sticks and other vegetation. The best part about doing this is that I got a chance to use water-soluble crayons! These are great as you can wash and blend colours without having to go down the watercolour route entirely; I had a lot of fun flicking colours around and letting crayon marks wash together in various ways.
As a result I feel that this is the better picture with nicely grouped trunks rising from the leaf-litter and a real sense of shifting colours in the foreground. I probably could have got away with less red crayon though.