Category: Trees

Ficus

Ficus

My thanks to Beth and Ian who ran the Art Tour: Drawing from Observation at the Apple Store in Leeds on Thursday morning. We headed for Trinity Kitchen and settled down to draw using Procreate on the latest version of the iPad Pro. This was the central tree, I think that it’s a weeping fig, Ficus benjamina, with a ‘trunk’ of intertwined stems.

Cherry at the Hospice

cherry tree sketches

The cherry trees surrounding the Hospice are all the same age and currently they’re being lopped back. Hopefully they’ll burst into blossom again, but we might have to wait until next year until they’ve fully recovered.

Oak Leaves

oak leaves

Oak, white deadnettle and so far unidentified leaf (cherry?) by the canal near the Navigation Inn yesterday.

white deadnettle
leaf

Maple

Maple keys, botanically samaras, and leaves. Each winged seed was connected to the stem by a thin tube. You can see remnants of these tubes in my drawing, one on the seed end of the maple key on the right and the stub of one on the nearest stem.

Lightning Sketches

birch

Lightning sketches from an engagement party, Normanton Market and a lightning-struck birch tree by the car park at the Seed Room, Overton. You can see the split running the full length of the trunk of one of these trees.

Screen Mirroring

rhododendron stems

Clip Studio Paint on the iPad: experimenting with adding colour.

screen mirroring
Screen mirroring in Photoshop: iMac Retina, iPad Pro, Apple Pencil and Sketchboard Pro.
rhododendron

I’m also trying screen mirroring so that if I’m working in, for example, Photoshop on my iMac, and I’ve got something intricate to do, like erasing background texture on a scan of a sketchbook page, I can switch over to working with the Apple Pencil on my iPad.

It would be possible to do a whole drawing this way but with Adobe Fresco, Clip Studio Paint and even a version of Photoshop on the iPad there’s no need to, I can draw directly.

I haven’t noticed any delay when I’m drawing using screen mirroring; the marks appear in real time.

Graphics Pad

For years I’ve used as Wacom Intuos 4 graphics pad for erasing or drawing in Photoshop on the iMac but with the latest Apple operating system, Monterey, Wacom no longer support that model. Working on the iPad should be more flexible, once I’ve learned the ins and outs of it, as I can see the iMac screen on the iPad. The graphics pad was blank, so I got used to drawing on the desktop and seeing the results appear on the iMac.

Trees are their Roots

beech

Beech at Newmillerdam, drawn this morning with the constant accompaniment of cooing wood pigeons and the occasional clatter of a beech nut dropping from the still-green canopy.