I am happy that I finally made another drawing:
I used a very fine (0.1 mm) black fineliner marker.
The drawing is 15 cm (6 inch) in width.
It took me three sessions over three days, since my hand would hurt too much after a while.
This is how I went about:
I saw a pretty, lonely tree in the middle of a roundabout and since I was too tired I had Marc take a picture of it for me (he was driving, but the road was empty, so he could slow down).
The next day I edited the picture to remove as much as possible of the background.
I then brightened up the picture and enhanced its colors and printed a large version of it on photo printing paper, as a reference.
Then I sized the picture down to the size of the drawing paper I was going to use, which was 15 cm in width, turned the picture into black and white and printed it again, this time on ordinary printing paper.
I used a light box (or…, how do you call the modern electronic version, that is much flatter?) and traced the trunk and the visible parts of the branches lightly with a pencil.
I also indicated the outline of the foliage lightly with the pencil.
Tip: I used Post-it notes to keep my drawing in place (you can reuse them lots of times).
Then I drew the trunk and those visible parts of the branches with my fineliner.
I even made sure to give the trunk structure.
Then I put away the ‘light box’ and just went on drawing freehand.
Now, the tree was huge (!) and my drawing small, so I couldn’t exactly draw individual leaves.
So from there on, using my reference picture, I just ‘scribbled’ suggestions of leaves. Starting light in color (with a more open structure) and slowly building up the darkness of sudden parts, by just more and more scribbling over it.
When the drawing was done, I erased the pencil marks.
I hope to draw more trees from photos that I’ve taken.
I love trees.
I hope you like my drawing.