Thursday, January 15, 2009

Forest for the trees

Now we move into the woods behind the field. At first, I was a bit overwhelmed with the prospect of doing the trees and did not quite know how to proceed. I did not want to wreck the picture after all of the work I put into it. I even contemplated leaving the woods out of the picture altogether. But rather than give up I did a trial run. I made a scan of the image below and then printed it out. Then I tried various techniques for doing the trees. I never was quite satisified with the result and decided to dive in on the real thing. Nothing like the prospect of losing hours of work to get you to focus. (You can click on the image to enlarge it).



I started lightly and layered on the detail until I achieved a reasonable affect. Below is a segment of the woods. There were a number of different tree types represented here; eastern white pin, poplar, oaks, spruce and maple; all typical of a north eastern forest in the autumn. Depending on the tree, different strokes were used.


Below the trees are further away and therefore rendered with less contrast and detail.


And here is the final result.

4 comments:

Waterrose said...

Your illustrations are beautiful!

Mark Alan Meader said...

This is really instructive stuff for anyone who really wants to learn how to draw. Interested to see how the heron comes along. Keep up the good work!

D. Hawks said...

Mark, Waterrose, I appreciate your comments. In this day of computer graphics and instant beautiful images, it is good to hear that folks still can appreciate hand worked art. One of my goals is to illustrate the actual amount of work required with pen and ink to achieve the final desired result.

andrea joseph's sketchblog said...

stunning work