Drawing Study: Tree and Hay Bales

While working out the concept for my next painting, decided to get some more drawing time in. This latest drawing was the basis for an earlier painting (Time for a Change: http://www.facebook.com/DougHoppesStudio?v=photos#!/photo.php?pid=4615901&id=139120096678).

In that painting, I worked off of a quick sketch of this area. I changed around a bit of the scene to be more to my liking. However, this time, I decided to be more true to the scene, itself.

The fun part of drawing trees is that you can't just scribble lines. For me, I first lay out the basic shapes of the tree in a mosaic pattern. From there, I sort of just "fill in" the areas with a basic tree/leaf structure. At this point, the tree looks like a lot of scribbles (The trees in the background are a good example of this mosaic pattern). Once I'm know where the edges are, I begin to play with the form and darken the areas where the edges meet. This helps give the trees volume. An important note is that, when filling in the mosaics, since I am working with pen/ink, the darkest hatching is the lightest area of the mosaic. I can't go any lighter, but I can go significantly darker.