Leaves In Graphite Pencil

Since we’re into winter and all of my beloved foliage is brown and wilted, I’m digging into old photos to find greenery to draw. I found this composition, so I guess it pays to take photos when your subject is bountiful.

I’m drawing this on Arches hotpress watercolor paper, and I’m using Mars Lumograph pencils. Arches hotpress holds deep black, you can create fine detail on it, and it has a lovely texture for graphite. The Lumograph pencils are always excellent quality.

As I always do, I start with a tracing that I transfer to my drawing paper. The tracing always includes many more lines than I need, or nearly every single edge or line I can see through the tracing paper. Once it’s transferred to my drawing paper, I erase the lines I don’t need and redraw just the lines of important details. Does this seem a bit complicated and silly to you? It does to me too, but it’s part of my artistic process, so there you go.

I started in the upper left-hand corner with the darkest area first so I’d have something to compare the rest of my values to. I’m working from a color photo in the Copyit app on my iPad. Usually, I work from a color photo instead of grayscale because I prefer to interpret my own values. Many times, a color to grayscale conversion looks flat, and I can find more depth and dimension when I look at and draw from the color version.

I’m rusty. I’ve sketched in the last few months but haven’t made a full value drawing like this in a while. After a few hesitant starts, it comes back to me, but the thin stems seem wrong. How could these delicate things hold such large leaves! I check the photo and I have drawn them correctly. Nature is both amazing and beautiful.

I’m drawing the leaves by hatching around the veins. Then I’m using the point of a rubber eraser to lift fuzzy white patch details from the leaf hatch. It leaves an indistinct white mark that mimics a bug bite, scar, or highlight. I press it into the hatch and lift it in a dabbing motion to lighten a patch. The edges of details are important for a realistic look, even the tiny ones. A beginner mistake is to draw the veins all hard edged, for example, and the leaf comes out looking too ‘sharp’ and ‘veiny’ looking. Veins have hard and soft edges too.

I’ve searched through my photos and found two more that I want to draw! I’ve never been this far ahead on drawing ideas, and it’s a comfortable feeling. I’m using an app called BeCasso to help myself find potential drawings. It’s an art/photo app that has several excellent drawing filters.  I use it to evaluate how my photos might look as drawings, and it lets me see the potential in photos I might normally overlook.

I can use visual placement to get the shapes of the leaves, and the shapes of the shadows and highlights within the leaves, in the right spots. However, since I’m working from a color photo, the values are pure interpretation. I’m constantly checking to see if my hatching is too dark or too light, but at some point, I have to trust myself. Trusting myself is something I have ‘issues’ with. I’d much rather have these things spelled out for me. Yes, I’m an insecure artist.

I’m leaving out some detail in this drawing. I’ve always left out small detail because I’d go crazy trying to include it all, but in this drawing I’m consciously choosing larger details to exclude. Specifically, veins in leaves. I want to concentrate on the shape of the leaves and their lovely texture, so I’m only including veins that I think are important.

What that means is when I check my drawing against the photo, it doesn’t match exactly. I have to judge for myself if a leaf is ‘done’ or not. And I doubt that I’m seeing things correctly, I suspect my values are off, I think my shapes are out of place, I’m convinced I should stop drawing because I’m awful at it. This is always a good time to take a break.

 I often soften the look of the hatch by going over it with a harder lead. I sharpen the pencil to a fine point and then touch the missed parts of the paper within the hatch with the point. This creates a half step value and a smooth hatch that flows over the paper. This technique is the one I most use when rendering leaves.

It’s tempting to add a lot more detail to the main leaf since it’s the center of attention, but I’m not going to. I’ve decided to add the major veins that have a mirror image on each side, and most of the smaller veins that have a leaf wrinkle by them. Hopefully, this will be enough to give the illusion of a fully veined leaf without mind-numbing detail, and the texture and shape of the leaf will shine through.

There are some things that are impossible to draw exactly as they are, and these leaf veins are one of those things. At the size I draw, the veins are so tiny that my pencil tip, no matter how sharp, cannot be easily traced along the edge. I can only make them so thin. After I make the veins as thin as I possibly can, I darken them with a hard lead to make them recede into the leaf a little. That’s as close as I can come to mimicking teeny tiny veins!

The center part of the main leaf is like a blurry jigsaw puzzle with squares, triangles, trapezoids, and other more squirrelly shapes. It helps me lay out the ‘pieces’ correctly, if I think of it this way.

The trouble with fuzzy edged shapes is that they can be hard to place exactly. And when you’re dealing with a whole handful of them, they can become a wobbly mess.

Once I did manage to wrangle the shapes into place, I was happily surprised when my two-dimensional puzzle blossomed into a three-dimensional leaf. This 2D to 3D ‘pop’ is one of the things I love about drawing.

However, there are some very subtle value shifts in this part of the leaf too, and I doubt that I’m drawing them correctly. I take many breaks and come back with fresh eyes trying to pin them down, but a correction in one area leads to another correction in another spot. On and on it goes. Time for a glass of wine.

I’ve darkened the upper left side of the central leaf. I knew it was too light, but was refusing to admit it to myself because I didn’t want to have to redo all that work! It was bothering me more and more as I worked on the other side, though. Turns out, it wasn’t that hard to do. I was able to take a hard lead over it and darken everything by a half step or so. The darker value makes the highlights on that side look better and sets the stage for the wrinkled parts of the leaf too.

Starting a new section on bright white paper is always slow-going and clumsy feeling. I never get it right the first time I lay down my hatches, and I go through several versions of ‘better’ until I reach ‘close enough.’ I love when the hatching flows together to finally create the texture of a leaf, though, and that makes all the work worth it.

After I laid down a fairly large section of hatching on the right side of the leaf, I realized that my values in the middle section were too light also. At least my values are too light. It’s far easier to darken a hatch with a hard lead than it is to try and lighten it with an eraser!

Good lighting is so important! I draw facing a large picture window, which is usually fine because the light from the window is gentle. It’s been snowing daily for the past week and a half, though, and the snow is making the light from that window bright white. So white that I think it’s been making me see my values wrong! I closed the curtains today, and I was able to draw much more comfortably, and it was much easier to get my values right the first time around.

I have struggled with sticking to a daily drawing practice for a while now, but I’ve decided to keep trying because I believe in my heart that drawing is an act of love, and when you love something you give it attention. Wherever you are in your drawing journey, I hope you’re making the time to draw regularly.

Keep drawing everyone,
Carol

Author: Carol

I'm an artist, an accidental author, and lover of life. I grew up in Yorktown, Indiana, and I've been writing (and drawing) this website since 1999. View all posts by Carol