Making your nature journal sketches come alive Laurie Wigham Presented at Nature Journal Club classes in the San Francisco Bay Area, July 2015
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Making your nature journal sketches come alive
Laurie Wigham
Presented at Nature Journal Club classes in the San Francisco Bay Area, July 2015
The “mark”
is a result of the way
your body moves
the tool
carrying the medium
over the surface.
Sitting down
making short strokes
with a soft pencil
on lightly textured paper
Standing up
making sweeping strokes
with stick dipped in ink
on smooth paper
MAKES A
DIFFERENT MARK FROM
For example...
Why does this matter?
Designed to make the identifying features diagrammatically clear, but they can be a little dull.
From Birds of North America
Bird ID drawings
How to show the life of the bird?
Use the energy of the lines to show the fierce challenge of a wren.
From Birds of North America
These drawings will help you identify a tern in the air
The line quality will show the joy of flight
John Busby, from Drawing Birds
From Birds of North America
Owl ID
David Koster “Snowy Owl” from John Busby’s Drawing Birds
What does the line quality tell you about this owl?
David Bennett “Bar-tailed Godwits Taking Off” from John Busby’s Drawing Birds
Wild marks can tell you about a moment of glorious chaos
Janet Melrose “Gannets over the Bass Rock” from John Busby’s Drawing Birds
How to get started?
Start with careful study, learning about your subject.
The expressive line can come later when you understand what you’re seeing.
Moving from the left brain to the right
Corn lily study
Learn about one plant, drawing it over and over
Corn lily study
Get a little looser each time, trying out different techniques, ideas.
Corn lily study
As you get to know your subject better, go more abstract, trying to show what you see about the essence of that plant.
Corn lily study
All are true representations of how it felt to be in a field of corn lilies on that hot Sierra summer day.
Practice gesturing:
Swift straight strokes
Swift curved strokes
Slower, droopier curved strokes
Making a hash of it: It’s OK to draw lots of expressive lines
Will you get bored drawing all those lines?
Using fast straight lines for bird tails
Quick flicks of lines show the way a Tailorbird’s tail flicks up
More fast straight lines for bird tails
Using fast straight lines for tails, wings, legs
Marsh WrenPhoto by Vivek Khanzodé
birdpixel.com
Song SparrowPhoto by Vivek Khanzodé
birdpixel.com
Long-tailed BushtitPhoto by Ashok Khosla
seeingbirds.com
Try it yourself, using fast strokes for the tails, beaks, legs
Practicing gestures:
Soft curving strokes
Stroke the pencil over the page like you were stroking a beloved animal
Looping footpaths, draped over hills
Caressing mountains, following footpaths
Draw the hills with pencil, in soft caressing strokes
Try dropping the line of this trail like a rope, fast and loose
Run your pencil up the lines of these leaves
What does the medium
want to do?
What kind of mark does a watery brush want to make?
Run your pencil up the lines of these leaves
A juicy loaded sable brush on smooth paper made these marks.
A waterbrush dabbled these leaves...
and twisted out these fern fronds.
What kind of mark does a watery brush want to make on rough paper?
What kind of mark does a dry brush want to make on rough paper?
Making marks
with
sticks
Marks from a burned stick dipped in ink and watercolor
After the Rim Fire
After the King Fire
After the Power Fire
Sticks enjoy drawing trees and branches
On smooth paper
On rough paper
Drawing with water-soluble ink
Noodler’s ink “Rome Burning”
Dipping sticks into small containers of watercolor
Drawing lines that twist, meander, and shoot out
More Noodler’s “Rome Burning” ink
Lines flying away like trees and grasses in the wind
The dried leaves were also made with a stick.
Dabbling with sticks to make foliage
Tightly descriptive lines
Loosely gestural lines
Practice drawing branches
with sticks
Get to know your stick
1. Break off a little bit of the end with your fingernail to make a point.
You can use different sticks with different points.
2. See what kinds of marks your stick wants to make.
3. Try making the same kinds of marks you made earlier with the pencil:
• Fast and energetic • Lazy slow curves
Don’t look at the paper. Just make fast curves up the page, with irregular leaf shapes.
Draw the trunk in two fast lines, then swoop branches down
Make your own twisting branches and spike needles on the next screen.
The curved lines twist lazily, the straight lines shoot out.
On rough paper, let the stick jerk when the angle changes
Give those birds another try, with sticks this time
Marsh WrenPhoto by Vivek Khanzodé
birdpixel.com
Song SparrowPhoto by Vivek Khanzodé
birdpixel.com
Long-tailed BushtitPhoto by Ashok Khosla
seeingbirds.com
More bird photos to practice on
Take a look at the websites of these Nature Journal Club members who have generously offered to let us use their photos as reference for drawings.
(Note that if you publish any of those drawings you should get permission from the photographer, credit them and include a link to the site.)
Ashok Khoslaseeingbirds.com
Vivek Khanzodébirdpixel.com
Moving forward:
It doesn’t have to be a stick
Most of you got beautiful results with the stick because it was it was a stranger to you.
You didn’t know what it was going to do, so you paid attention to the mark on the page and let the stick tell you what it wanted to do.
You can apply the same thinking to any other medium to make your drawings come alive.
Inspiration from many sources
See these Flickr galleries with work by many artists:
Gesture in nature journals 1
Gesture in nature journals 2
Scroll down the page to see all the images.
(Click to enlarge.)
There are trees.
Lots of trees!
Hills, paths and more.
Enough to take you a long way down this road.
For more info about Nature Journal Club events, go to:
johnmuirlaws.com
To get on the mailing list for other classes I’m teaching, email me at:
For info about the San Francisco sketching meetup group, go to:
meetup.com/sf-sketchers
Some links
This presentation is copyright Laurie Wigham, July 2015
and may not be reproduced without permission.
All artwork ©Laurie Wigham except where otherwise credited.
Contact: [email protected]
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