Every year, pandemic willing, I spend a week in the woods a few hours north of where I live. It is a necessary and needed break from the city and the rigors of my job. There is something very special about having no screens, phones and computers. No radios, and no noise other than the forest and its inhabitants.
This time of year is also just as the leaves are changing colour. The deep green of the woods picks up crimson, burgundy, flame oranges, yellows and ochre, It really is a stunning, if very brief, time of year.
Exercise 1: Tree Structure Studies
I did a number of pages of structure studies of a small maple tree in my neighbour’s yard, and a fir tree across the road. In my doodles, I also found myself thumb nailing out larger landscape compositions.
Exercise 2: More Trees
I took a number of supplies to the woods, and ended up trying my hand with soft pastels to try to capture what I was seeing. The lesson learned is that I need to continue practicing that, but also that pastels don’t mix the way paint does. If I want a specific palette I need to make sure I have those colours in my collection.
In particular, I really struggled trying to capture atmospheric perspective in the distant trees. I didn’t have the right blue greens, but did what I could.
The images below are all from the same section of lake shore, looking in the same direction and the same set of white pines peeking up above the tree line. They were more or less successful in various ways.
The park we go to is just at the southern edge of the Canadian Shield. The stone is all this pink granite, which has such interesting interplay of colours. In watercolour, I’d use Potter’s Pink and Cobalt Turquoise to create the colour but I couldn’t do that in pastels. This ended up looking like a piece of meat, so I tried laying some browns on top to tone it down.
Despite a far too tropical look to the lake water, I quite like how this sketch turned out. If I do it again, I’ll adjust the spacing of the white pines as they are far too equally spaced.
In this one I liked how the forms of the trees were starting to come together. I tried doing hatching to convey distance, and that was both really hard and not effective. Instead it pulls the eye strangely.
There was also a singular maple tree in our campsite with wonderful bark deformations. Not to say there weren’t scores of trees around the camp site, but this was the largest and was very central. It was impossible to get a vantage that I could look at the whole tree, but it was the bark forms that were drawing my eye. I used drawing pens, and leaned in on hatching. I’d really enjoyed doing the hatching of the small demon figurine in my assignment 2 piece, and so chose to continue in that vein.
Although the site was in the middle of the woods, and there was no vantage where there weren’t zillions of trees, I decided to cut back to just three trees in order to convey space. As I wanted to keep the detail and darks on my subject tree, I chose to tree the background trees as low detail gestures. I’m quite pleased with this drawing.
