I found this dried leaf among my knick-knacks and thought it was just as pretty as any man-made object. Unfortunately, no matter how I arranged the lighting, the leaf appeared somewhat flat in all my photos. My challenge was to make the leaf appear as three-dimensional in the drawing as it did to my eyes. The photo is at the bottom of the post.
I chose to draw this leaf with a non-blended technique to match its rough texture. I used Mars Lumnograph pencils on Fabriano Artistico paper because this combination creates a visually rich texture.
Landmarks
To begin, I drew some landmarks and then applied a light overall hatching that gave me something to compare the leaf’s values to. I don’t like to draw the object’s true values immediately because I prefer some wiggle room for later adjustment.
While hatching in these first values, I discovered that the best way to give this leaf more depth was to draw the raised part of it lighter. This fools the eye into thinking there is more height in the fold area.
If you’re wondering why I didn’t average the values and draw the form of the leaf first like I did in the shell study in the last post, it’s because I’m using a different technique. I wanted to preserve as much of this hatching as I could by using my eraser as little as possible. Erasing tends to blur the hatch.
Jigsaw Puzzle
When you work with a lot of detail like this leaf has, you have to focus your attention in two ways. One kind of focus is how each bit of detail is shaped, and the other is how all the detail bits fit together over the leaf’s surface. Each detail piece is like part of a jig-saw puzzle piece, and they fit together to make up the form you are building.
Hard and Soft Edges
The bottom section of the leaf had many hard and soft edges. Hard edges end abruptly, and soft edges gradate into the next value. I placed and drew them by quickly looking back and forth and comparing the reference to my drawing.
Finished Leaf
To draw the raised portion of the leaf, I worked with harder pencils to draw the values more lightly. For example, I used HB and H pencils for the other areas of the leaf, but I used H and 2H pencils for the raised area. I didn’t draw all the details in that area but included a generous 60% of them to give the illusion of a completed leaf.
Since I’d been working with so many details, some of the values had been ignored. So, to finish the leaf, I compared it with the reference and darkened values where needed. If you compare the photo to the drawing, you can see that I took a lot of liberties with my interpretation.
Keep drawing everyone,
Carol
