I’m always afraid of sounding like a self-help book when I talk about drawing. That I’ll be full of platitudes and gaggy puns. That you could call me Chicken Soup for the Unwilling Soul and call it a day. But I think that there are a couple of things you should understand: I was not an artsy kid. Actually, I was not a visually artsy kid. I did orchestra and dance but I didn’t take any visual arts courses. I didn’t even think that I was capable of it. I couldn’t cut in a straight line. I couldn’t draw. I couldn’t colour in the lines. I still can’t cut in a straight line, but I own a cork-backed steel ruler and utility knife now. I also can’t colour in the lines, but I’ve noticed that most other people can’t either. And then we have drawing.
As some of you may already know, I’ve been teaching myself how to draw since just about the beginning of time. Well, actually, I think that I really decided to learn how to draw last spring. My progress has been slowish because I’m easily distracted by just about everything, especially since it currently takes me forever to draw things. I often forget to plan my drawings. My garbage can is full of off-centre drawings or drawings that don’t entirely fit on a single page. Although that kind of failure is avoidable, it is still discouraging to chuck what was going to be the best bird ever into the garbage because its tail feathers go off the page.
According to Ptichka, drawing is all about seeing things. And she’s smart so I listen to her. I’m good at the seeing bit; I have a habit of staring. It’s the transfering what I actually see to paper that gives me fits. I’ve begun realizing that part of seeing, is determining which details are necessary to render an object recognizable and plausible. On one hand, unless you’re a realist painter à la Mary Pratt, there’s no need to produce photo-realistic drawings. On the other hand, if you want to move beyond drawing symbolically, i.e. producing those perfectly symmetrical apples you drew in elementary school, then you do need some detail.
You’re saying to yourself right now, “Well, that’s nice. All this seeing business. All this deciding that you can be an artsy kid. All of these details from your life that could apply to just about anyone else’s life. But the only reason I’m reading this is because the title has ‘tree’ in it and I like trees. They’re pretty.” Well, here come the trees, but you’ll see, the preamble (or preramble*) was necessary.
Ptichka bought me Bruno Munari’s sweet, slim little book Drawing a Tree for Christmas. In the book, Munari boils down trees to their essence. His number one rule for drawing trees is that “the branch that follows is always slenderer than the one that comes before it.” And I know that this sounds simple. Of course, the following branch is slimmer than the preceding one, but trust me: sometimes seeing something doesn’t mean that you’ll draw it that way.
Take this ATC by me as an example. I will admit right now that I don’t like it very much. It’s dumpy and dumpiness in my work is my nemesis. But other than that, I just couldn’t produce in paint what I saw in my mind and upon review my mind definitely saw each branch slenderer than the previous.
Besides the cardinal rule of trees, Munari also covers all sorts of little things that will make your trees look better: mad branches (those ones that seem to come out of nowhere), the basic branch structure of trees, what happens when there’s wind, and bark patterns. While all of these things can be combined to produce a specific type of tree that anyone could see in her local park, they can also be combined to produce a plausible tree. By plausible, I mean, you can draw a tree that only exists in your mind but that could exist in the real world if it had to. I really love Drawing a Tree for the latter.
Towards the end of the book, Munari writes:
At this point someone says: I can’t draw, I’m hopeless at drawing. I’m absolutely useless at drawing, I can’t drawn anything, nothing at all. These people are terrified of making fools of themselves, of drawing something wrong or everything wrong, so they refuse to draw.
I used to be one of these people. And while I don’t want to credit a single book for making me realise that I am neither hopeless nor useless at drawing, I must admit one thing: I didn’t enjoy the process until I sat down in my parent-in-laws’ house and drew tree after tree after tree during my vacation. And I don’t feel like I really noticed my surroundings before that either.
Then again, it may just be that the end of my real, actual arch nemesis is in sight. Move over dumpiness, it’s the spector that haunts my life and keeps me awake at night: graduate school. And I can’t wait for it to be over. I feel like it’s holding the best part of me hostage.
*gaggy pun alert!
That’s really cool, Zhenia. I think I need to go get a copy of that book, and it was great to see the progression of your trees. Beth
this made me ponder that wicked thing that scares the bejeezus out of me: maybe i can let go of my fear of “not knowing how to draw” and just have a good time doodling like i used to when i was little. not that i’m getting anything out of your schmaltzy self helpedness. but maybe, just maybe…
Beth: It’s a really great book, I highly recommend it. I’d love to see another one about birds. Hmmm…maybe I’ll write a zine or something later.
Georgie Girl: Oh, don’t poo-poo my schmaltzy self-helpedness. I read your post on your wedding anniversary and you, my friend, are a certified cheeseball, even though you try to act all cool and stuff.
nice one but add more pictures like more trees and flowers
and also we want to draw the picture by step step for example firt we draw leaf and the next step is draw the stem next step is roots so like that !!
please try to add thanks
km: sorry kiddo, this post is a book review with some of my illustrations. i won’t be adding any step-by-step instructions or pictures.