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 . . .

Drawing a sycamore ball - 3

Today I spent time working with the lights and darks of the sycamore ball.  In reality, the whole seed pod is basically the same shade of medium brown.  But if I drew it all over with the same intensity of pencil, it would end up looking like a flat blob.  How do you make it look round and sitting firmly on the table?  The answer to this dilemma is to draw the gradations of high light areas and low light areas; the highlights are lighter and the shadows darker.  This is pretty straightforward, right?  As I draw, I'm constantly thinking of the light source, how it hits the seed pod.  Fortunately for me, the pod has texture to it, not at all smooth, and so there is very little reflected light to worry about.  So here's how it looks, nearly finished:

I will leave it like this and move on to the other parts of the composition.  When everything is done, I'll look at the whole thing and make sure the balance is right.  So next up: another sycamore ball tucked behind a leaf... Stay tuned!

Drawing a sycamore ball - 2

Well I've been staring intensely at my sycamore ball so long I need to take a break.  Hooray for blogging!  I've gotten the form down -- every little casing and spike and cavity is drawn in.  I draw what I see, not what I think I see.  This involves really looking at the subject, then down to the paper to draw just what I saw, then eyes back on the subject again.  Lots of looking back and forth.  The trick is not to get lost . . . "Where was I? What was I just drawing?"  This happens when drawing the many petals of a flower, or in this case, the many spikes of the seed pod.  Anyway, I finally captured it all.  Whew!



You can see that there is some dark shading in some areas, but not in others.  It is uneven.  That is because I mostly was concerned about getting the form right.  I wasn't really paying attention to relative darks and lights.  I will go back and work on these light values next.  My light source is above and to the left, so I have to make sure all the shadows reflect that.  And to make the sycamore ball look round, I've got to darken the outer edges and create areas of highlight.  I'll leave that for tomorrow!

Drawing a sycamore ball

In my opinion, there are few things in nature as difficult to draw as a sycamore seed pod.  I've spent the better part of the morning staring at the thing and finally I think I've figured out how it is constructed; and therefore now I know how I'm going to draw it.  Let me see if I can describe it to you:  What you've got is essentially a sphere within a sphere.  The inner sphere is almost like a soccer ball.  Can you imagine the hexagon patches of a soccer ball all sewn together?  Well in a sycamore ball, each 'patch' is actually a hole in which a seed case grows.  The seed grows and matures in there, and when it has swollen to its finished size, the casing pops open to let the seed out.  What you're left with is the bird-beak-like case poking out of the 'soccer ball patch' inner core.  All together, the open seed cases poke out all around the inner core to create the outer prickly sphere of the sycamore seed pod. 

Here I've started to sketch in inner core, with its irregularly shaped hexagons:

And here is what it looks like as I start to draw in the 'bird beaks':



I know this is a hard thing to draw because I am sighing a lot as I work.  This is dangerous, though, because as I have already mentioned, the material is extremely lightweight and if I sigh too heavily I'll destroy my composition (again.)  Ah well, this is a good exercise in perseverence.  See what good life lessons one can learn from picking up a drawing pencil?  Back to work . . .

Sycamore Situation

I know you probably think I've been goofing off the past few days and not drawing.  But you are wrong!  I have started to tackle a complicated drawing of a sycamore leaf and two seed pods.  I love sycamore trees.  The flaky multi-colored bark, the huge and graceful leaves, and most of all the seed pods, bouncy spiked balls that litter the ground beneath the tree each fall.  A couple of months ago, when I was working on the leaf-a-day project, I found this one leaf that was just too beautiful to paint quickly.  I set it aside, along with a handful of balls.  I think it would make a lovely graphite study and so I've been spending the last couple of days playing around with the composition, and doing quick sketches to get the feel of it.  Here's the composition I ended up with:

To do a formal botanical drawing one prepares much the same way as for a formal botanical painting.  Remember how I started out with the oak leaf?  First sketches, then a finished sketch, then transferring the image on to good paper, then checking all the lines to make sure the composition is right, and THEN, finally, beginning to do the finished work.  So, I've just transferred the sycamore image on to the nice paper. 

But as I was moving the nice paper back to the drawing table . . . disaster struck!  I accidentally knocked the arm of my drawing lamp, which swung around and hit the edge of the leaf.  The leaf, which is completely dry and weighs nothing, skittered around and knocked the sycamore balls.  I essentially blew up my composition!  Sigh.... Thankfully, I have this really good sketch which shows me exactly what was sitting where.  It will be like putting together a 3-D puzzle, but I think I can get it back to the way it looks on my paper.  Ah, the hazards of botanical illustration . . . Once I put it back together, I'll start the final drawing.  Stay tuned!