November 12, 2011

    Today we had the opportunity to admire some particularly large and lovely trees, so it put me in the mood to draw a tree... but it was dark by the time I got to it, so I decided to reference a photo. I found one I took on the walk between the metro and my sister's house. I'm not sure of the type (no leaves), but it had striking black and white bark. Hmmm... pen and ink, then. It needed something... a person reading at the base, of course.

November 4, 2011

    For quite some time, I have been intending to make a sampler of textures... to try out some combinations of stippling, cross-hatching, smudging, sharp point or flat of the graphite "lead" and so on which I wasn't always finding opportunities to play with in drawing specific objects. 
    Here, I did that - and then just to pull it all together and give a nod to the patchwork of Autumn tree colors out there (even though in black and white), I made the sampler patch into a stick tree, complete with falling texture-patch leaves.

August 2, 2011 - August 3, 2011

     I worked on this landscape over two days, although I wasn't able to scan or post the intermediate stage of the drawing. These trees are on the lawn outside of the dining hall on the Marine Biological Lab campus.

April 16, 2011

     This is a relatively fast (but not quick) sketch of a wisteria in our ash tree with the "Roo box". 
     Explanations:  This is a slightly larger sketch book, so even sketching in a faster vs. more meticulous manner, it takes some time to cover the area. The flip side of the size equation is that if I use my tiny carry around sketch book I end up wishing I had more room for certain details or even just all the important features! 
     Wisteria... yes, I know it's invasive and all that, but I'd admired it from childhood and thought that I could keep just one vine under control. Well, this vine is about 15 years old and it only began to take off somewhat in the last five years, only had one panicle of bloom last year, and this is the first year it has really bloomed. I've read up on it, we do all the right things, and yet... So much for rampant. 
     Roo box means that this was once the home box of a very special little boy squirrel - a one-in-a-million squirrel.