Giving the grass a haircut and drawing with a twig

I next went on to do some drawings and sketched using the photos I took that were inspired by Andy Goldsworthy, that I mentioned in the previous post. The first one I did was a very finely detailed pencil drawing as I wanted to focus on the details of the whole photo before zooming into sections of it to use for textured sketches.

Detailed pencil drawing

 After doing this pencil drawing I played around with it until I found sections that I liked and thought would be interesting for sketching. The two sections I chose are shown below.

Section 1

Section 2

I wanted to use some unusual and innovative materials for these drawings that also related back to the element of earth. For the zoomed in section of the pine cone I used black ink but drew it on with a twig as opposed to a pen. After doing the drawing in black ink I realised it would benefit from another colour to give it more depth and texture so I also added in orange ink.

I wanted to draw the leaf drawing by getting the colour from the the leaves I'd photographed, but after playing around with them for a while and doing some sort of science-y experiment stuff to try and get the chlorophyll out, I realised that probably wasn't going to work. Instead I used grass to get the green colour, which involved going into the garden with scissors and giving the grass a haircut as well as a lot of rubbing grass across the page. Leaving just the green areas on their own didn’t give the drawing much definition and made it extremely difficult to see any outlines of shapes, so I also added fineliner over the top. I varied the density of the lines from the fineliners to create lighter and darker areas and to define the form of the leaves. By viewing this drawing from a distance its structure is more visible as the lines from the fineliner merge to create areas of tone.

Drawing of section 1 

Drawing of section 2