Draw a tree
I really like looking at trees and trees are a great subject for drawing. I am glad to live in a city that is relatively green, where I can see lots of interesting old trees just on the street. My street has lots of trees but this is a park tree. I wanted to draw with a pen which got me remembering a period in my youth when I discovered and became really obsessed with the work of Albrecht Durer. He was a German Renaissance artist who made a lot of very meticulous engravings that really impressed me and got me practicing pen and ink drawing. Durer created an amazing level of detail using overlapping networks of very clear, precise lines.
Drawing with pen is great practice because there is something very definitive and uncompromising about it: ya can’t erase it. This might seem intimidating at first but it is also liberating - you don’t have to worry about erasing and that means that you have to accept whatever you put down or find a way to work it in the design if it is something you would have otherwise erased. After a while you get into the flow of it. For me, the angle of the tree wasn’t exactly right but the very first lines established it so I went with it from there.
Many old trees develop very clear bark patterns and interesting weirdnesses like the growths that attracted me to this particular tree. I also love to notice how the bark pattern on trees sometimes spirals up the trunk. There’s a story there of the tree having turned as it grew for one reason or another. Another interesting thing to draw is how the tree emerges from the ground. I sometimes see people drawing a straight line at the bottom of their trees. This makes it look like the trees is cut off, as if they were just placed on the surface. Trees slow motion explode out of the ground and, whatever stage of growth you see them at, you can see that where the tree touches the earth. It doesn’t take a very deep look to notice that roots emerge from the ground and become fused into the main body of the tree. Or that earth and grass intermingle with the base of the tree, thereby cancelling that cut off look.
It started raining while I was doing this and you can see that in the drawing as well - a nice reminder that drawing can happen outside and maybe it’s something that can reliably get us to a park or away from the phone screen. Here are a couple more trees from some favourite artists: can you guess who did these? One is easy and one is hard. Show me some trees you’ve drawn and let me know your thoughts on what I’ve written about this week.
