Tree! - a Conté drawing

 

During the workshop morning with Pictura in the garden of the 'Dordrechts Museum' I sketched some of the trees there as these are old and impressive. 

There are three Platanus trees in that garden, that were already there when the Museum was founded, in the year 1904. These trees are maybe 200 years old and they look like their age. The trees are really large and as they are in a garden in an old city it is not possible to make a (reference) picture of the whole tree, they are too tall for that. 

The tree trunks have several bulges, maybe scar tissue where branches have been cut off. The lowest branch grows at least 3 meters above ground.

After I had made my sketch, I moved on to another tree and did not do much with this sketch. The sketch went to the exposition in the 'Pictura' building that ended over a week ago.

Now the sketch is back in my home - and my studio - I can work from it. The vertical lines in the sketch are showing the structure of the corrugated cardboard that we had to support our sheets of sketching paper.

It has been over two month that I was in that Museum garden and my memory of that tree has faded a little, there are no reference pictures, so the sketch is all I have to work with. 

This Conté drawing, using brown and earth colours on a light brown (naturel) background may not be an exact reproduction of the tree or the sketch, it does show what did attract my attention to this tree: the bulges on the tree trunk.

The information about the materials I have used, the size of the Conté drawing and its availability can all be found in my Tumblr blog.

Purple loosestrife (Lythrum salicaria) - pencil drawing

 

After I had been drawing the Cattails (see my post about them) I wanted to use that paper more often. Because of the special colour of the tinter paper (vert-de-gris) not many subjects are suitable for a drawing. The reeds and cattails inspired me, so I made some reference pictures of the purple loosestrife that often grows near these plants.

The purple loosestrife also grows on the edges of water, just like the reeds and cattails so I made my drawing using the view of the leaves of the broadleaf cattail behind the purple flowers. My reference picture was made from a safe distance and I used that to draw the impression of the flowers instead of showing all the details. 

Making a good picture of my drawing was a challenge again, not only the colour of the paper is somewhat elusive, the magenta I used for the flowers also fades to red. In the end I used a camera (not my phone) and settled for the right colour of the drawing, not so much for the paper.

The information about the materials I have used, the size of my drawing and its availability can all be found in my Tumblr blog. If you are interested in my work, please contact me.