It's Time for Real Looking Shrubs!

Do small shrubs present a drawing challenge for you? Let's look at this one here and work out some of the problems that are commonly had and how we might manage it in a more effective way. Basically we're overwhelmed with the form, with the complex surface area and silhouettes and textures and so we start doing a jagged line, we start doing a few funny things for the silhouette bits we see on the edges and then we just start putting them everywhere and there's some branches that we can see we realize and so we add those and we add a bit more detail but we're as much just putting this pattern that we've developed over the whole thing as actually looking at our reference. What might be a better way? Now that first drawing took two minutes to actually draw, just over two minutes, so obviously it was sped up. For this one you're actually watching me draw this in just over seven minutes in the actual drawing time. So this is my drawing speed, my drawing, my observation, my thinking, my pausing to look at what I've done and to see is this working or not. The first thing I do when I look at this is I think this is a three-dimensional ball, this bush. It's not large, it only comes up probably mid-thigh, it's a fairly small bush and very much because of the way it's been pruned it is a ball shape. So I need to keep that in mind, that first drawing, and you'll get to see these both side by side at the end as well as with the photo, that first drawing was very flat, it almost looked like cut out paper just dropped onto a sheet of paper. So I want to capture the three-dimensionality of the overall shape and I'm not going to be able to do that if I don't stop to work out what it is first. The other thing I need to do is to work out where the light's coming from because that's going to give me a sense of the the patterns of lights and darks and possibly where some of the darker shading and shadowing might be. The light here is clearly coming from the upper right down onto the bush, onto the shrub. So I've worked out that and I start by just positioning a few, my first marks, a few very dark values to represent some of the darkest spots in this shrub and they're going to be my reference points at least at the start. Now I can shift them slightly, shrubs are a very forgiving subject for making adjustments as we go if we decide a part of it needs to be a bit wider or a bit longer or something such as that. But this is at least my starting point for now moving outwards and you can see I began to explore marks for the silhouette edge on the lower left and then I've just done a few even less definite, even more tentative marks along the top to start to establish where the top of this shrub is going to be. Now I'm trying to put marks on the paper that will blend in, will become part of the finished silhouette mark making. One thing I'm very conscious of is if we look at this shrub, if we look at the absolute top line of little branches, twigs that we can see and we drop a little bit there's actually another line that goes across and that line is much closer to us than what is actually the top line and that's because this is a three-dimensional ball and the back part of the top part of this ball is actually higher because it's not a perfect ball, not a perfect sphere, is actually higher than the closer part of it. It was just the part closer was just pruned down a bit lower. So I'm going to want to show that in my drawing with my marks that that if you like second top section line that's closer to us. I'm going to try and make that a bit heavier so it feels closer and that will help bring the sense of three dimensions towards us and also of course darker again in that very center section of the ball because that's where we have some branches coming straight at us and they're the closest parts of this. Now the whole thing is going to be very quick and brisk so I'm not going to agonize these effects but in general terms this is what I'm trying to do and you can see now I've done the silhouette edge around the whole thing and now I'm just trying to establish more of the marks. Now the challenge here is to not just end up putting the same marks over the whole thing so that I lose all my white paper and you can't really tell what's what because I filled in all the white paper gaps. So that's going to be the other challenge. Now having drawn lots of tree canopies it's a similar approach but the scale is different and the sorts of shapes we're trying to create is different and the marks that we're using are a bit different as well for most of the trees I draw. So I still want to get that spiky feel that this regularly pruned shrub has. I don't want to lose that but I don't want to suddenly start doing a caricature a cartoon effect of that spikiness which is what ended up happening in the first drawing. I'm also starting to put some generalized hatching over this and by that I mean I'm not hugely looking at the value of that particular bit of the reference. I'm thinking well this is a ball and the sunlight's coming down from the upper right so it's going to be darker here and lighter here and kind of in the middle values here and so I'm using that. I'm not doing it absolutely perfectly of course because then it would look too smooth. I want to still create the raggedness of this and I'm going to keep create the raggedness of this shrub by my marks and by how the values sit across the whole thing. Doing a few few bits of grass here they look more like a signature don't they than anything else and now just working on the base because we're because there's foliage at the very bottom of this shrub and because we're slightly looking down on it we actually can't see where the the it seems a bit extravagant to call them trunks but but where the branches go into the ground and now I'm just establishing some of these little twigs here that we can see little branches that we can see and I'm getting close to my time in a moment we'll compare please hit that like button for me uh if you haven't already and I have a whole series now I should make them into a playlist shouldn't I of where I draw a perhaps a more common version technique for drawing troublesome subjects and then I do what I think might be perhaps a happier interpretation a happier technique happier use of marks for the sort of results that we might be wanting to get so I still want to not make this too dark all over and I'm also very aware that this is still going to be a quick grab and I'm a bit surprised I'm not going over my outer marks but I think they sit back very nicely and so that was perhaps a a change in my expectations as I drew and I feel like the the center feels like it's closer to me than all around the edges and that's very important too bit of grass around the edges and then I think we're done and if you want to have a go upskilling your shrub drawing there'll of course be a link to this reference photo in the video description below so why not have a go shrubs are pretty common so here are the two side by side with our reference which one do you think works better are you going to have a go drawing one of them g'day I'm Stephen Travers perhaps the most important thing is to understand that these subjects sometimes just will take more effort than perhaps we're expecting to have to give but if we give it over time it will take less and less and look better and better so hope you have a go but whatever you draw however it turns out make sure you have fun I'll see you next time bye