Not pears

Turns out I did not paint or draw pears today.  I spent time, instead, installing cable boxes on our TVs.  I am not technologically gifted.  I am, in fact, a Luddite.  I would so much rather have been painting!  Alas, I did not have a choice in the matter.  If we don't install these boxes, our TVs will no longer be able to receive the cable signal, apparently.  Since this blog is supposed to be about botanical art, though, I will not bore you with the tale of Holly's Adventures with the Cable Company.  For that, you must go to my "Musings - around the house" page.

And I'll try again tomorrow to paint those pretty little pears!

February inspiration

Finally we have come to the end of February, to what I would consider the brownest time of year here in Central Virginia.  The soil in the growing beds looks worn out -- old mulch, old stray leaves, last year's growth I never completely cleared away, and a crust of decaying leaf litter that is working its magic at a microscopic level, but SO unattractive!  Above ground level, we do have the evergreens to be thankful for, but mostly the view is brownish green grass and endless silvery brown sticks and limbs and trunks and branches which for me have lost their charm.  I know new life is just about to burst out of this brown dreariness, but I'm getting impatient!

When I run out of inspiration at times like this I like to head to the greengrocer (that is to say, Whole Foods).  Nothing cheers my color-starved eyes more than the sight of all those vegetables, bursting with color, arranged artfully in heaps bin after bin.  We try to eat locally grown food in season, but who can resist the oranges and yellows of the citrus fruit, the deep reds of the Swiss chard and hothouse tomatoes, the purples of the eggplant and Bermuda onion, and vibrant greens of the cabbage and kale and all kinds of lettuce trucked in from who knows where??  I want to help the local agricultural economy as much as the next guy, but in February, all bets are off! I bought some adorable little Bosc pears which I will draw tomorrow.  In the meantime, check out this amazing cabbage --

By the way, they do know their stuff at Whole Foods, as far as merchandising goes.  Someone in the head office has studied color theory for sure.  You will often see vegetables arranged in stripes of complementary colors.  For example green cabbages next to the red and orange beets.  Red beets next to the green zucchini.  And next to the zucchini, the red peppers, then green, then orange and yellow peppers next to . . . eggplants!  See what I mean?  They do this because it makes the vegetable look even more vibrant and alive set next to something of a complementary color shade.  Sneaky, hmmm?  I don't care -- I think it is a beautiful feast for the eyes and as long as I stick to my shopping list, I'm OK!

Daffodil - final

Finally I had a chance to work on this dang daffodil.  I must admit, I fought it the whole way.  It may as well be an oil painting for how much paint I used on the paper!  Yes, it does look like a daffodil, and yes, it does look correctly three-dimensional.  But I missed completely (I think) in capturing the essence of this flower.  It doesn't look light and breezy and gracefully transparent the way it does in real life.  Nope.  It sits heavy on the page.  Ah well, usually I nail it but sometimes I don't!  

A Daffodil for Holly

Now that spring seems intent on coming early, I will embrace the change and tackle my least favorite color (artistically speaking): yellow.  I do love the color yellow, don't get me wrong.  I just don't like painting it!  Yet here it is, popping out all over: in daffodils, winter jasmine, witch hazel and forsythia.  If you're going to celebrate the coming of spring, you cannot ignore yellow!  So today, I thought I'd try a daffodil.  Seems easy enough.  Everyone knows what they look like -- six wide petals surrounding the sturdy trumpet.  There are more daffodil varieties than you can imagine, and more hybrids developed each year.  Early bloomers, mid-season and late, miniatures, giants, doubles, in every shade of white and yellow and even salmon pink and orange! 

The challenge of painting yellow is that it is difficult to squeeze a wide range of color to denote form and texture.  Normally, it is easy to make a color a shade darker or lighter to describe how a thing is sitting in space and what is its relationship to the light source.  But with yellow, you can't simply darken it up.  when you do try to darken it, if you aren't careful you will quickly end up turning your yellow to green or worse, mud.  And lightening it up pretty much means you go to white, which, again, is a tricky proposition in watercolors.  I'll show you what I mean as I get in to the painting.

The second challenge I've set for myself is the daffodil itself.  It is not an easy thing to draw.  Essentially, you've got a disc of six petals with a cone protruding from it.  The end of the cone is frilly and furled.  And in the center of the cone you've got the stamen all loaded with pollen.  The lines are graceful and natural and easy to capture, but it can sometimes be a royal pain to get the three dimensionality just right.

Still, it is such a pretty thing.  So cheerful and strong, bobbing in the early spring breeze.  Bouncing back resiliently after an unexpected dip in temperature or a blanketing of late snow.  I have to have a go, don't I?  And today is Holly's birthday.  My step-mother.  Probably the most sunny, positive person I know.  For her, a daffodil is definitely in order!  I just had time to get the sketch done today.  Tomorrow I'll paint it.  Happy Birthday, Holly!

Hellebore drawing

I think it is time to move on from graphite and get back to some color!  February is a bleak month, weather-wise, and the long gray days and cold nights get to me.  I (and every other warm-blooded soul) long for spring.  This is an unusual year in that the mild winter weather has confused the plant kingdom and things are shooting up and blooming out of turn.  We've got daffodils bobbing their sunny heads by the mailbox, and the winter jasmine and forsythia are way ahead of schedule.  Still, the blossoms I look for in February every year are the hellebores.  The delicate, graceful, pastel blooms peeking out from robust, leathery leaves call to mind a warmer, more agreeable landscape than my eyes now behold. 

The Hellebore's common name is 'Lenten rose', which is apt since most species bloom between January and March.  The most common species available for our gardens is Helleborus niger, or 'Christmas rose'.  This is not aptly named because it rarely blooms in time for Christmas.  In fact, in my garden it blooms in February!  Still, I welcome it all the same.  Here is a colored pencil drawing I made several years ago:

I had a beautiful border of hellebores planted in a large clump under several tall tulip poplars.  Sadly, one of the poplars had to be taken down because some insect infested it and killed it.  The tree guys thoughtfully dug up the hellebores before they took down the tree.  But they replanted them in a soldier straight row, all lined up at the base of the remaining poplar.  This looks ridiculous and so very unnatural.  But hellebores hate to be transplanted, and I thought another uprooting would kill them off for sure.  So there they grow still, in a crop row straight as an arrow.  I laugh every time I walk by them, thankful they made it through the ordeal!

Enjoy!

Sycamore and Sweetgum- final

So here it is, the crisp flyaway sycamore leaf bumping up against a couple of sweetgum balls, all ready to scatter at the slightest breeze, or sneeze.  I do wish you all could see this up close and in person.  I think there is something special about pencil on white paper.  The graphite bonds to the fibers of the paper and becomes something altogether new, neither pencil nor paper.  An illuminated thing.  Without color it is a far cry from the living thing it represents.  Yet somehow it does live on top of the paper.  Hard to express . . . you have to see it for yourself.  I guess this means I'll be doing a show one of these days!

Meanwhile, enjoy!

Drawing a sycamore leaf - 5

I'm playing in the shadows now.  See if you can tell what I did between this first photo:

And this second photo:

I know it is hard to tell with my amateurish photography skills, but perhaps you can pick out a few things.  First, did you notice that the cast shadow on the right side of the leaf changed?  (Oops! Have I ever mentioned 'cast shadow'?  It is just what it sounds like -- the shadow that an object casts.) Look at the area in front of the back seed pod.  In the top photo, the shadow is like a stripe -- Horreurs!  I fixed it by making it mimic the leaf shape more, as the shadow actually does.  I guess I got carried away and wasn't looking at what I was doing!  Also, do you now see a faint shadow under the stem of the leaf?  It is faint because the stem is up the air quite a ways off the table.  Finally -- and here's the bonus point -- did you notice the shadow inside the hole in the middle of the leaf?  It kind of sticks out now, but I think once I draw in the splotches and freckles on the leaf, it should look about right.

I want to work a bit more on the inward curl of the leaf, but I've basically got it.  Then add the speckles and freckles and I'm done!  Check back in a day or two and I'll show you the finished piece.

Drawing a sycamore leaf - 4

Ahhhhh .  .  .  now it is starting to look like a leaf.  I love this part!  It's like painting a mural standing a foot from the wall and finally stepping back to see that - ah yes - it does look like what it is supposed to look like!  What a relief!

Still lots of work to do, however.  I will now go back in and get all the veining detail as well as those spotty freckles.  And I'll try to get that leaf to sit on the page, rather than float above it, as it is doing now.  Also, there's more work to do on the deeper shaddows. 

(Oh, while I'm thinking of it, take a look at my mechanical pencil.  It is a Staedtler 980 drafting pencil -- very cool.  It has a good weight to it, and you can advance as much lead as you like.  The sharpener works the lead to a precision point.  I love it.)  

Drawing a sycamore leaf - 3

Hope you all are enjoying your Super Bowl Sunday!  I am taking a pause in the festivities to have a little quiet drawing time.  Sometimes, when I'm working very closely on a subject, I can't see the forest for the trees.  I am looking at something up very close and through magnifying glasses, and I get lost in the multitude of details: the impossibly crisp sharp edges, the spiderweb-like veins coursing across the surface, a little hole that an insect chewed, the subtle flip of the tip of each lobe of the leaf. . .  At this point in my drawing, I shouldn't be so concerned with every teeny detail; I am still trying to get the basic shapes and shadows worked out.  I can't help myself, though, being a down-in-the-weeds kind of gal.  I love that stuff!  I have to force myself to take breaks and sit back in my chair and take a look at the whole leaf and how it is coming along on the paper.

And today I made a really helpful discovery.  On one such break, I forgot to take off my magnifying glasses, and when I sat back in my chair, the whole drawing table became a big blur, as if I just put on someone else's specs by mistake.  Then I noticed something wonderful: it erased all the teeny details of the leaf that I'd been obsessing over, and all I could see was the basic form, the basic shadows, the darkest darks and the lightest lights.  (You get the same effect if you look at something through squinted eyes. Only the essential information gets through.) Eureka!  This is what I'm trying to draw at this stage of the game! 

Now I'm getting somewhere!  As you can see (hopefully!), this leaf is not smooth as paper but rather has a bit of a crinkle to it.  I could easily get bogged down trying to draw each plane of each crinkle, but I'm managing to keep it general.  I'm sitting back further in my chair as I draw, so my view of the leaf is suitably unfocused, and it has made all the difference!

Drawing a sycamore leaf - 2

Today I worked on the right side of the leaf.  Hard to know exactly how to tackle it, so I just started to draw and see what happens!  As you can sort of see from the photo, the leaf is not a consistent brown.  It has a mottled surface with lots and lots of dark brown 'freckles'.  This is a good thing and a bad thing, as far as drawing goes.  The good thing is that it is really handy having a leaf pattern or in this case mottle marks to help show how the leaf curves in space.  It is also helpful to convey highlight areas, because in these areas, the mottle marks will be much lighter, if you can see them at all.  But the bad thing is that it is sometimes hard to distinguish pattern from shaddow, when you don't have the benefit of color to work with.  I decided to dodge the quandary all together today and just focus on other things -- the curve of the leaf, the beginning veining marks, beginning to show shading and also some variation in the browns of the leaf.  I'll leave those pesky freckles for another day!

Drawing a sycamore leaf - 1

OK now that I've got the sweetgum ball identification fiasco behind me, on to the leaf!  I've started to very lightly shade in the form of the leaf.  I want to put down an even layer of graphite over the whole area of the leaf, so that I can see what is 'leaf' and what is 'not leaf', or negative space, on my paper.  This is much like the "tea wash" stage of a botanical watercolor painting. 

There's a knack to drawing lightly.  I don't want to see any lines as I fill in the shaded area, so I hold my pencil way over on its side and grasp it nearly at the end.  Then I draw in a small, circular motion, just letting the weight of the pencil be enough to bear down to make a mark on the paper.  It takes time this way, but there won't be any hard lines and I won't make any impressions in the paper.  The graphite just sits on top.  I'm using an HB pencil, which is a medium soft lead and can get quite dark if I'm not careful.  I want this to be as light as I can possibly make it.  This 'ground' is very important to establish, so that I can add (with the pencil) and subtract (with a kneaded eraser) more graphite layers.  I know it doesn't look like much yet, but stay with me!

Sycamore or Sweetgum -- setting the record straight

My parents always taught me that honesty is the best policy, so I need to 'fess up about something I just discovered.  My pretty little drawing is NOT of a sycamore ball after all!!!  I was out walking yesterday and went by the place where I picked up the specimens which I'm currently drawing.  There was the sycamore tree, with its flaky, multi-colored bark.  There were some big, wide, brown leaves still gathered around the base of the tree.  And then?  The seed pods?  There were some there, but . . . they aren't spiky!  They are bumpy and round like a button, and mostly still hanging from the tree.  What I had inadvertently picked up were seed pods from the tree growing right next to the sycamore.  And since I've always thought these were sycamore balls, I never thought to check!!  Well, yesterday when I got home I went straight to my tree bible, Dirr's Hardy Trees and Shrubs, and got the scoop (which is what I should have done in the first place!)

Platanus occidentalis (American sycamore) is also commonly called American planetree, buttonwood, and buttonball-tree.  It has large leaves which can grow to 9" across.  The “button” names come from the shape of its fruit – like little round Christmas tree ornaments. The fruits appear in late summer and hang on to the tree through the winter. Each ball is actually a cluster of many seeds which will break apart in spring.  It isn't particularly interesting from an artistic perspective, if you ask me.  The sycamore is a great and noble tree, however.  It is one of the tallest of the native eastern North American deciduous trees and can grow to be 75 - 100 feet tall. 

Liquidambar styraciflua (Sweetgum) on the other hand, is widely planted throughout the East, Midwest and South for its excellent fall color.  Its leaves are star-shaped and turn gorgeous shades of yellow, orange, red and burgundy late into the fall (see my blog entry on November 4 -- another mystery solved!).  The sweetgum grows 60 - 75 feet high and has deeply-grooved, scaly bark which explains one of its nick-names, Alligator-wood. Its most distinctive characteristic, though, is its fruit: the woody, spiny, capsular globe I've been ignorantly calling a sycamore ball!

So now you know two things:  first, you can tell the difference between a sycamore tree and a sweetgum tree.  And second, you know my artistic knowledge exceeds my botanical knowledge.  I just checked with the Virginia Department of Forestry website and I learned that there are 98 species of trees growing in Virginia.  I can only identify (correctly) 18 of them.  I'm hoping you won't hold it against me!

As they say, back to the drawing board . . .