October Drawing Project - Plants, flowers. foliage
| Find your flower or leaf. Use the same one throughout your project. Let it wilt, change, age so you have interesting things to observe each day or each time you look at it. My first recorded flower drawing, on looking back through my school books was of a daffodil to make a design for my schools St David’s Day celebrations. I thought I’d put it here for a giggle! It is cropped so you can’t see the date at the bottom of the sketchbook page, carefully recorded in neat calligraphy style letters. I can see that I was trying to convey that each petal was not just a flat shape but had an undulating form, a gently curved surface with slight ripples. The centre trumpet, looking like a cupcake, shows this in an exaggerated way making it look quite solid. All the devices I used in this drawing are ones which we will look at in this project – use of line, tone, colour and outline to indicate a 3D form. |
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| FIRST THOUGHT – Outline and silhouette Use a simple linear marker such as a pen to draw the main shapes – these could be around the outline or around internal edges you can see. Try not to guess the way the shapes should be – just honestly record what you see. |
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Use a different media to help you look at the lines perhaps in different way. You could close in to a smaller area, maybe where a petal and leaf join on to the stem. If you find a medium you enjoy, keep using it and make several drawings of different area and from different angles. You could cover a larger sketchbook page with these studies – partial study drawings that build up a page of interesting visual information of your flower or leaf. The fine point of a brush can create a lovely painted line as a positive mark or as a negative line in bleach as in this drawing below. Use a nylon brush when using bleach – perhaps the very useful nylon brush with the attached reservoir to contain the bleach shown below with my favourite fine line drawing pen. |
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Draw your lines onto wet paper using a medium that will spread your line. The drawing below of a small detailed area of my plant was done with my non-permanent pen so the lines flowed outwards giving the lines extra character and perhaps suggesting tone and depth. |
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SECOND THOUGHT – Added tone Tone will allow you to suggest that your plant is a three dimensional object and not a flat shape. You can add areas of tone to a linear drawing as shown below. Tone was added to the whole flower pen drawing here with a very watery ink and a small paint brush, using the brush strokes to suggest the ripples of the petals as well as the lack of light. |
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You can experiment with different media to add tone to a linear drawing. |
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This study below uses black paint with different amounts of water to create different grades of tone and a soft pencil. |
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Charcoal has been used and smudged in the drawing below. This piece of charcoal was picked up in the woods at Hestercombe Gardens in an area where charcoal burning is still done on special occasions. It was fun to find a piece to use in my own drawing. The ‘char’ produced a good strong black. The edges of the charcoal 'lump' were used to draw fine lines. |
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Add tone to a linear drawing very lightly and sparingly to avoid your drawing looking ‘over done’ and sometimes ‘dirty’ by adding too much, particularly with such a smudgy medium. Restraint is good! A much more controlled way of creating tonal area within your linear drawing is to continue with a linear medium such as a pen and build up tone by layering the lines in a cross-hatching pattern, dots, flecks or maybe a combination of these effects. |
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'Scribbled’ lines are another way of adding tone to your drawing. This method is much less formal than the one above and gives a lovely sense of energy to your drawing – perhaps this is because you use a lot of energy in the making of the marks, it translates itself into the character of your drawing. You can’t change the direction your hand seems to like scribbling but you can change the direction of your scribbles – keep turning the paper around! |
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Notice that the two drawings below and above have been done on ‘printed’ pages, mentioned above.Try using several rows of meandering lines to suggest tone as well as touches of darker colour – the same as the ground colour perhaps to co-ordinate drawing with ground. |
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THIRD THOUGHT - Negative spaces Colour some background surfaces with inks or paints. Don’t forget to ‘print’ the wet page on the opposite page to make interesting grounds for later drawings. When dry, draw your outlines shapes and use a dark medium (dark Stabilo pencil used here) to darken the areas around the outside of the shapes to denote the space behind your plant. The use a light medium (white, pink and yellow Stabilo pencils used here) to suggest areas where the light catches the undulating surface. |
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Try a tonal drawing below using an eraser to remove the lighter areas from a carbonised surface. Use a very soft pencil (8B for instance) or charcoal. The light areas of this single petal were ‘drawn’ using an eraser and then a few, very dark areas around two of the edges were emphasised with a firm dark marks to sharpen certain parts. Some edges have been allowed to look as if they merge into the background. Try doing this yourself. |
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FOURTH THOUGHT – finding rhythm and repeat patterns Plant forms will nearly always show some element of pattern. This might not be a regular repeating pattern but one that is a rhythmical repetition of shapes and edges. Look for this quality in your plant and draw it to show this. Use a line media as below which suggests the layers of edges with similar bands of irregular ripples. |
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Use a paint brush, held as a printing tool or a crayon or charcoal or chalk on its side. |
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Find a simple way of making a stencil edge – ripping or cutting a scrap piece of paper and using it to make stencilled edges or repeating shapes to add to your drawing. |
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I hope these four ‘thoughts’ will help you to create a fascinating series of studies of your plant. I hope those of you working on the Embroidery Diploma Course with Distant Stitch will find this Project particularly useful for Module 4. Finally – a fifth thought – you might like to look at the Drawing workshop I’ve written for ‘Workshop on the Web’ due to be published in the next issue. Look out for ‘Hats off to Constable’ which you can access if you are a subscriber. If not you might like to take out a subscription especially? www.workshopontheweb.co.uk |
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