Pen and ink: Trees ( Day #2 of 7 )

Continuing on with my personal challenge, here's today's tree.

This was a fun (but time-consuming) exercise in hatching and shading.

It took about 90 minutes and was drawn with my Lamy Safari fountain pen using a standard black Lamy ink cartridge. The paper was 200gsm cartridge paper. Although it's not really thick enough for adding washes, it is an ideal weight for laying down lots of hatching layers without the paper buckling or starting to wear through.

Workflow

Here's some WIP shots so you can see how I tackled it.

• First I sketched the outline in pen. I didn't worry too much about heavy marks as I knew there'd be a lot of shading in this one to soften the outlines.
• Next, I started shading the centre-most roots and branch that projects forwards. This was to enable me to establish a master tone that I would match the two sides of the tree against (and the trunk behind the projecting branch).
• Next I worked from the roots upwards, establishing the light and mid-tones. I left the heavy shading until later to make sure I was happy with the texture of the hatching.
• Next I started to darked the areas of interest to emphasise the forms of the tree. This tree has plenty of holes, branches and bulges so it needed contrast to really help those to take shape. I also added the background to give me an idea of how dark the darkest shadow areas needed to be.
• Finally (see finished piece above) I added incidental texture, additional branches and tweaks as necessary.

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