Trees & Foliage, at 'FARP'

By Alisa Simonoff-Smith, Gallery 259.

	Tools:    While graphite drawing doesn't take many tools, there are few that are a must. 1. Pencils. Personally, I use four different pencils of varying hardness. HB, 2B, 4B and 6B. Of course, not all of these are necessary to draw trees. You can get away with using only a 2B, but I like the others for their darkness. 2. A scratch tool or any sharp object. I use the scratch tool for scratching the paper so that I will have white lines that graphite will leave untouched. 3. A stomp or tortillion. These are excellent tools for blending. 4. A kneaded eraser. These things are great. I can pick out a point on the eraser and use it to add highlights. No messy rubbings. 5. You'll also need paper. I like heavy paper that I can scratch without ripping through. I use Strathmore 60 lb. recycled paper (there's my green roots again).
	Step 1:    First, I close my eyes and visualize a tree. This time, with the use of some reference photos, my mind came up with two oak trees, one of them tipped over, with its mass of roots exposed. I always find roots very interesting. Using a nice 2B pencil I lightly sketch in the trunk and major limbs. I tend to leave out the foliage at this point, instead concentrating on the branches. Smaller branchlets and leaves will be added in the next step. For right now just focus on the placement of the limbs because foliage is a pain to look real if there aren't any branches to hold it.
	Step 2:    Okay now that we have the shape of the tree(s) I'm going to start adding the foliage and shading in the trunk. I am going to tell you this now: If you try drawing in every little leaf, you are going to be sitting here drawing this tree until Ragnarok. Don't do it. Besides, your eye does not see every single leaf in nature, and neither does a photograph. What I do is take a somewhat hard pencil and draw the indication of the foliage using wiggly lines. The closer together my lines are the more dense the foliage is. I pick out a few individual leaves as I go along.    I switch back and forth between a hard pencil and a soft pencil for the limbs. At this point the top of the tree is in shadow, so I don't worry too much about the bark besides a few highlights to indicate texture. I place in some branchlets to help support the foliage; some going in front of the leaves and some going behind, and some hanging in air with no leaves at all. For branches that are hanging in front of the trunk itself I take a scratch tool (or any sharp object will do) and score a line, being careful not to cut all the way through the paper. This way, when I shade the trunk, the scored line will remain white and untouched by the graphite.
	Step 3:    After most of the foliage is in I take a hard pencil and draw in the general outlines of the bark. Then I begin adding darker values and use a stomp or tortillion to blend the graphite together. A kneaded eraser is used to pick out any highlights. I build up on layers, first laying down a middle gray that gets darker with each successive pencil stroke. I switch between the point of the pencil and the side for sharp angles and broad soft layers. The bark of an oak is rough so I use sketchy strokes to indicate texture.
	Step 4:    At this point the tree is pretty much done. The trunk, branches and roots are detailed, the foliage is drawn in and (in my picture) the foreground is shaded. But I wanted to make things hard on myself and add a background. When working with graphite I draw the foreground first, to save on erasing and dirtying up the paper with graphite dust. I switch to a soft pencil for that more distant look and make soft strokes with the edge of the lead. The trees are done the same way, drawing in the trunk first then adding foliage with little squiggly lines.
And done! I add in a few final details to polish this picture off and now I am calling it abandoned. It is in my experience that drawing trees in pastel, charcoal, conte and even ink can use the same process as graphite, with only a few modifications.