I found the photo reference for this drawing on a rainy day after it had stopped raining but before the sun came out. This is my favorite lighting because the highlights are subdued, but the shadows aren’t too dark.
I am using Arches hotpress watercolor paper and Mars Lumograph pencils (6b to 4H). The Arches paper has a unique texture that can hold deep black and delicate fine detail, while the Mars pencils never feel gritty and have a beautifully wide value range.
There are so many leaves in this drawing that I couldn’t include them all in the original line drawing, so that’s where I started. I added the missing leaves to the top portion of the drawing. The leaves I had drawn gave me clues about where to add the missing leaves, but patience was still needed to place them.
For this drawing, I deliberately chose to work from a grayscale reference. The vibrant green in the color version was almost distracting; it seemed to glow. However, in grayscale, I could focus on the form and structure without the hindrance of color. The Copyit app on my iPad allowed me to switch between grayscale and color, giving me the best of both worlds when needed.
I immediately decided to omit specific details from this drawing. The fuzz along the edges of some stems is unnecessary for the overall drawing, and the tiny teeth along some leaves’ edges are too small to be workable. Omitting them will make my life much easier.
I had to use my book light while drawing because the overhead light washed out a lot of detail in the dark areas on the reference photo on my iPad. So, I turned that light off and worked from the book light clipped to my drawing board. The booklight is bright and lightweight and has been a great addition to my drawing toolbox.
I want to draw your attention to the three highly textured leaves in the middle top of the drawing. Oh my goodness, what a pain they were to draw! I thought their detail added something nice to the drawing, so that’s why I didn’t blur them. They are the only leaves with that much detail, which is good. The reason they were so challenging to draw is because of their size. My sharpened pencil tip was almost too large to make their textures.
This section of the drawing has multiple layers of leaves, so it needs a lot of attention to detail. The leaves have different values that require careful shading. However, I can’t work on shading for very long without needing to draw more detail lines. This start-and-stop circle of shading and detail work frustrates me. The drawing does get less cluttered as it moves downward, so I just need to soldier through the rough bits.
The leaves have a variety of veins, and the barely there veins are the most challenging to draw. Here’s how I draw a leaf with veins that are hard to see but that I still want to include.
Using a sharp H pencil, I draw the vein’s edges slightly darker than I want them to be so I can see them. I can lighten them easily in a later step. I don’t draw all of the veins, and the ones I do are not perfect. I was careful to make the vein lines run at the correct angles, and I tried to arrange the veins to be as true to life as possible.
Using a sharp 2H pencil, I added shading to the body of the leaf, working around the veins. I didn’t need to lighten the vein lines as I thought I might, and they blended into the shading perfectly. I stopped the shading short of the edge of the leaf on the right and bottom left, where there is a light line around the edge of the leaf.
Using a sharp 4H pencil, I finished the shading of the body of the leaf with attention to the details around the veins. Since I wasn’t drawing an exact rendering of the leaf, I left out a few veins and many small details, like the tiny teeth along the edge of the leaf. However, I think I drew enough detail to make a realistic leaf, which was my intention.
I wasn’t happy with this leaf, so I decided to add a few more minor details. I used my 4H pencil tip and Mono Zero eraser, which I had sharpened into a fine wedge, to add details around a few veins.
I’ve been debating how much detail to include in the parallel leaves hanging in a row in this section. I want to achieve a balance – not too little, not too much, just enough. It’s challenging to bring each leaf to the same level of detail when the target is a sort of sliding scale.
I wasn’t planning to include the fuzz along the horizontal stem in this part of the drawing, but now I believe it should be included as it contributes to the story of the leaves. I’m not sure how to draw the fuzz. I’ll have to invent the process as I work.
My ‘fuzz process’ turned out to be fairly straightforward. I erased tiny perpendicular bits along the stem with my Mono Zero eraser that I’d cut into a wedge shape. Then I ‘whittled’ down those erasure marks with a very sharp 4H pencil tip until they looked like tiny fuzzy spikes.
I noticed that I drew the values a little too darkly in the last section, so now I need to make sure the values in this section look accurate. I want them to be as true to life as possible, but I might have to make them slightly darker to work with the values in the previous section. It feels like a balancing game at this point.
Because this drawing had so many elements, I didn’t take the time to trace the tiny details of the leaves, twigs, and vines. That left me with a sort of ‘blobby’-looking beginning line drawing that I have to add the details to as I go along. I’m beginning to regret that decision as I work on this drawing section particularly because it’s so detail-heavy. I could have used a few more hints as to where things go.
Each leaf is a collection of shapes, values, and lines. They are not hard to draw, but they are delicate and numerous. All these intricate leaves are taking a long time to draw. I’m going to have to add more drawing time to my day.
One of my favorite leaves to draw is the round Redbud leaf. Its veins are clearly defined, and its smooth texture creates sculptural body shadows that are fun to draw. Its mid-range value can sometimes be created with softer pencils, making it easier to draw than leaves in the higher range of the value scale. And after you’ve drawn one, it seems to have a lot of weight or presence on the paper.
Here’s how I drew a big round Redbud leaf.
I’ve lightly drawn the outline, all the veins I want to include, and some highlighting along the upper left edge. This leaf is lighter than the leaf above, so I’m using a 2H pencil to draw the details and a 2H pencil for the shading. I’m careful to imitate how the body shading gets darker near the vein and where the stem attaches.
I switched to a 4H pencil for the shading because the 2H was too dark. I concentrated on getting the body value right in this leaf section and creating the shallow vein valleys. I’m not including all the veins; I’m just adding enough to satisfy my vision of what a leaf looks like.
The shadows on the leaf in the middle section are very faint, so I had to concentrate and take my time to capture them accurately. The most prominent detail was the diagonal stair-step pattern at the bottom middle of the leaf. As I drew, I constantly looked back and forth between the drawing and the photo to ensure I placed the features where they belonged.
I hatched in the value on the body of the left side of the leaf, keeping it lighter than the leaf above. The vein details were tricky since some of them had a thin strip of white showing. I drew the white veins by drawing around them and then touched them up with an eraser afterward. After finishing the leaf’s fine details, I added some body highlights with a kneaded eraser. I rolled the eraser into a small round ball and gently lifted out the highlights with a tapping/rolling motion.
At the bottom of this drawing, I often have to turn off the overhead light, clip my book light on my drawing, and let my iPad illuminate the dark areas of the photo. This allows me to see the dark areas more clearly and draw them with more depth.
Now comes the dreaded ground ivy with its tiny, frilly edges that appear slightly blurred. I always try to avoid ground ivy in my reference photos, but I couldn’t hide this small patch. I have to draw it.
I’m not drawing the ivy perfectly. It’s at the bottom of the page, and there’s not very much of it, so I hope I can get away with drawing it with fewer details than the rest of the drawing. I’m also editing out some of the leaves. There are so many of them that I don’t think leaving out several leaves will leave any holes.
I’m happy with this drawing. It packs a lot of visual information into a small space, but it’s balanced well. And I got the values about right. It reminds me of the busy lushness of summer, and that’s the look I was going for.
In other news, I’m taking an online class called The Science of Wellbeing. It’s a popular three-week course from Yale University and is free. In the first week, you take a lot of tests to determine your characteristics, including your top five strengths. You’re supposed to practice each of your five strengths once a day for the first week. One of my five was creativity, so I decided to do some sketching from life. I draw daily as I work on my primary drawings, but I hardly ever sketch, so sketching is fun and exciting.
I’m working with a Viewcatcher and a small 3×4” sketchbook. A Viewcatcher is a plastic gadget that slides open to various dimensions. You use it to frame what you’re drawing. It’s handy for quickly and accurately putting the basic outline on the paper.
The class seems good. After one week, I’ve learned that I can make myself deeply happy by practicing my strengths, which makes me extremely curious about the rest of the class.
That’s all for now.
Keep Drawing Everyone,
Carol