Weekly Art Practice - Week 9
Spending a week on trees is kind of a weird one. It’s pretty rare that I would want to draw a singular tree, more often I’d be wanting to draw a forest as part of a landscape or some simple background shapes where the tree isn’t one of the pain focal points. But I still wanted to do this week to spend time looking at West Coast trees and try to find ways to quickly construct trees that I could possibly re-use for the NaNoRenO project.
Day 1 - Drawing from imagination
It’s pretty easy to mentally bring up an image of a tree, but even my mental image of a tree is way more simplified than what a tree actually looks like. It’s easy to think of triangle pin trees, or apple trees that are mostly just a green circle for the leaves and then a trunk. Trying to be realistic mostly feels like drawing leaves and branches until you get tired of it.
I did take a stab at some non-local tree types that were in my head from preparing my reference photos the day before. There are some very interesting trees out there.
Day 2 - Figure sketching
Tried to make myself speed up for figure sketching this week. It worked for the first three, mostly just laying down shapes. After that I spent more time thinking about the smaller parts of the tree and wanting to give them more detail as the first 3 felt like messy blobs.
Day 3 - Reference studies
It was a little strange to do reference studies since I know my goal for the end of the week isn’t to replicate trees exactly. At this point I started to play around with brushes to lay down leaves faster, using the reference mostly for shape.
I did multiple pine trees because I knew I’d be drawing a lot of them in March. These were pretty simple in that I just tried out 3 different brushes to act as the pine needles. Then on the more detailed one I just tried hand drawing a bunch of branches. Which didn’t actually take too long in the end.
Day 4 - Style studies
There were a lot of different styles I wanted to spend time on but it could have been a project for the whole week. First I tried some of the vector styles that I had tried a bit when doing lighthouses & landscape week. And then a more cartoon-y style that I like a lot for it’s flow.
Reference: Vector trees & cartoon trees
Then I tried for some watercolours but remembered the watercolour brushes I like are on Procreate and not in Clip. So I don’t feel like I was able to really re-create the right style there. But I like the originals and may pursue them on paper someday.
Reference: Watercolour trees by Olga Sokal
Then I wanted to do a more painterly one. I liked how blocky this one was and used some new square brushes that I was finally able to find. Pretty happy with this vibe but don’t feel like it’s a great fit for trying to draw a whole forest.
Reference: Painted tree by 白术
Day 5 - Drawing from imagination
There were a lot of tree styles I liked so I attempted to do a variety of them from memory. The vector type, the take it slow type, and a block-y painting type.
Conclusion
I don’t feel like I have strong takeaways from this week except for the new found curiosity to keep exploring other styles. I wasn’t expecting trees to have so much variety but I guess since they are one of the most common elements to a nature scene they are re-produced constantly. So I can see re-visiting trees in the future as there are more on my Pinterest board I’d like to experiment with.
With NaNoRenO starting today I’m thinking of putting my Weekly Art Practice work on pause while I focus on all the art pieces needed for the VN. Got a few scene sketches started today, a meer fraction of the work ahead for the planned project. But I’ll probably keep to weekly blogging just with sharing game progress instead of practice progress.