Part 3 Project 1 Ex 3

In this exercise I will be sketching a group of trees.  In my last course, Exploring Ideas my final work was based on a group of silver birch and I did a summer collograph print that I was particularly pleased with.

Silver birch collograph from Exploring Idea

Now it is winter and the trees are bare and the weather is dull and damp.  I have a friend who calls this sort of weather "dreek" which I understand to mean a combination of dismal and bleak, and it fits well.

It's raining and misty and I don't feel inclined to go outside. I have taken photos of groups of trees from various windows. These are the best.

North with the garden shed in the background

North towards the power station

South towards the church

I cropped the one looking towards the church.

Crop looking towards the church

With a bit of license it could be said that the hedges in the foreground are just well pruned trees!  The indistinct smudges in the distance are Scots pines.

I worked indoors looking though the window.  I sketched on pastel paper using a charcoal pencil then worked it further with charcoal sticks. Towards the end I put in some yellow Conte crayon on the mahonia and browns on the hedge.  It was hard to resist putting the brown leaves on the beech tree because I know they are there but in reality everything just looks grey.

I liked the way the mahonia looked but the image was best when I cropped some of it off:

A Dreek Day (1)

Two days later...

If I'm honest I don't really like this very much and feel dissatisfied with it.  The drawing of it felt laboured and arduous and I don't think it is very expressive.

I had another try and set out to actually use tone.  I have found tone difficult so I made a sort of tonal bar to help me to decide which tones to use:

My tonal bar

I decided that the beech tree was a dark mid tone and worked from there.

A Dreek Day (2), charcoal

I felt much more free doing this image.  I didn't dwell on any detail; just the misty, spectral trees.  I particularly like the tree in the right foreground because it's very textural.  I used a dark tone and lifted some out with a putty rubber leaving circular marks.  I then added dark marks for the shadows.

On the way to the Harley Gallery this morning I drove through Clumber Park.  For the first time in ages the sun was out and the sky blue.  Lime Tree Avenue was perfect so I took a photograph so that I could draw later.

Lime Tree Avenue, Clumber Park (1)

This quick charcoal and pastel piece left me in a much better frame of mind than Dreek Day.  Maybe it was the sunshine.

There are however some things to note:

• I used a grey pastel paper.  White would have made a better job and allowed the day the brightness it deserved
• The trunks of  the trees in the left foreground look a bit hefty and the branches start too far down.
• A very light blue wash would have helped the sky along a bit using the white paper for highlights.
• As most images do this looks best from a distance.
• It's sometimes the next day when objective review is best made.

I'm a bit like a dog with a bone and I couldn't let this lie so I tried again using white paper in my sketchbook. I took the opportunity to put things right.

Lime Tree Avenue, Clumber Park (2)

This captures the feel of the day much better.

Quite coincidentally the water colour course I've been doing with Stephen Coates worked on trees today. This is what I produced:

Winter trees with lake

This course (six lessons) is now complete.  It has dwelt on water colour technique and the science behind it rather than personal creativity and I've found it a revelation.  The importance of planning and trialing ideas is so important because one mistake and you are unable to complete the work. As well as learning about water colour I've learnt lots about tonal value, perspective and colour mixing that is very relevant to my OCA work. There's a further course that I intend to enrol on next year.

Stephen has published these first six lessons in his book "The Water Colour Enigma". (1)



(1)  Coates. S. (2014).  The Water Colour Enigma; Science of the Medium. Arc Publishing and Print, Sheffield