Today was a lovely sunny day and I decided to wander down to the park at lunchtime - where I found out that it was also rather windy! Not to be dissuaded I cast around for inspiration and found it amongst the autumnal leaves blowing around on the ground. There's something rather attractive about leaves which I can't quite put my finger on; perhaps it's their distinctive shape or fine detail or maybe just a legacy of drawing so many of them at infant school. Either way this is one which I liked:
For fun, and because I don't get 2-hour lunch-breaks, I decided to employ my technique of creating multiple sketches with each one taking no more than 10 minutes to complete. I always enjoy the chance to experiment like this, with no great expectations, and today further proved the benefit of this process. Further restricted to a 2H pencil only I started my first picture by lining out the dominant shape and then working to extract detail from this:
The result wasn't too bad but I also realised that I needed to relax and draw more fluidly if I really wanted to capture the look of my leaf. So in the following pictures I drew the outer line in almost a single movement and then worked out where to add more detail; apart from being faster this also gave me the freedom to concentrate on shape and shadow above all else. In fact I almost ended up with too much time and in the last picture probably added too much shadow.
Anyway I rather like the results of this experiment with the third picture being my favourite; with this one I decided to invert the light and dark regions to see what might happen and I think that this somehow gives the leaf more interest and depth. That's the beauty of art - it's all about interpretation rather than reproduction.