A piece of beautiful blue sky framed by some beech trees caught my attention, made me stop and do a gouache sketch. I really enjoy the beginning of these sketches when everything is a possibility and the colours can be dropped and splashed around. Buy this sketch as postcard on Zazzle

It is funny how each year gets it’s own character by the variations in the seasons that I notice while drawing and sketching outdoors. Last year became the year of the forest with the diary I had started without knowing how it would all turn out. This year seems to become a time of slow [...]

What is good drawing? This question comes up quite naturally when a couple of artists or art lovers meet and start to discuss their subject of interest. Defining good drawing seems to be as difficult as defining good painting as soon as the question of accurate or academic representation is left. But even getting over [...]

Today I explored the branches and twigs of yesterday a bit further. Also I played with my drawing tool to find out what kind of lines the Pentel Gel-pen might produce. I took a break between two sessions of 20-30 minutes and returned about an hour later to the same place. As the sun moved [...]

Temperatures are getting more comfortable this week and daylight stays longer. The season for afternoon and evening excursions is near. In coming days I want to do a couple of drawing studies on twigs and branches. The beginning is made with a stack of apple tree timber on a meadow. I started with a slow, [...]

Rainy days can be great for drawing, if the rain is not too heavy. This little study of an apple tree, trunk and and a big branch, was drawn while sitting under an umbrella. The one I have has a little rope at the top which I use to hang it into low branches of [...]

Using so called negative forms or space is a popular method to relax from concentrated observation on drawing outlines of a subject. Instead of following the outline of the tree branches one can shift the view to the empty space in between. Those closed forms of sky patches are often easier to outline than following [...]

Todays illustration is a small 5X7 detail sketch of an oak tree trunk and how it branches out. Compared with the works of the artist Amy Talluto, found via Design Squish blog, my drawing looks quite humble. Amy Tattulo has an amazing drawing portfolio on her website with smashing, realistic graphite drawings of trees and [...]

The next blog posts are dedicated to drawing tree branches. One of the mopst interesting parts of a branch is the base of the branch, the connection between the trunk and the branch. The older the tree and branches are the more a kind of “shoulder” gets visible. The pen drawing above shall illustrate these [...]

The time is coming that our trees stand bare of leaves. Drawing trees in winter is a special delight as the beauty of their branches can be seen in full. At the same time vistas are possible that have been obscured by leaves during summer. I found an interesting blog post about branching on sevensixfive [...]