the Forest for the Trees
Where we learn to draw trees, plural.
Today’s issue of Random Orbit is a re-tread of a blog post from this past October. Before I launched this newsletter this past fall, I occasionally wrote and posted in the “news” page of my website. It was writing this post about drawing trees that convinced me I wanted to do this more often, and with more structure. Normally, I would worry that anyone reading this has already read that. But my Squarespace visitor stats say otherwise (LOL).
I did a bit of editing and adding, so if you are among the ~eleven people who visited that original post, it’s not exactly the same.
I’ve loved drawing trees for many years, ever since my grandmother’s friend Mayme1 taught me how to draw them back in 1975 or so. She took me to a window, spiral notebook and felt-tip marker in my hand, and showed me how to look at the tree, beginning with the trunk, and follow it along, see how it splits into big branches, and see how the big branches then split into smaller ones, and smaller, until they become twigs. Draw one branch to the end, then another to the end, and so on. Eventually, you have a tree. Breaking a complex thing down like that makes it seem so simple2 and I’ve carried that lesson with me for nearly fifty years. In my life as a professional drawer-of-things, I’ve drawn a lot of trees. I’ll go out on a limb3 and say i’m actually pretty good at drawing individual trees. But, I’ve always had trouble drawing many trees. Forests, or woods, or stands of trees and shrubs, where the backdrop is a jumble of leaves and trunks and branches and a riot of color, or even just a dark space where the trees continue into the distance. Many artists do this well — Maurice Sendak, obviously. I mean, Dear Mili. Come on.
And Carson Ellis does amazing woodsy scenes in Wildwood.
There is something about a woods, a forest, that gets deep into the heart of me and my psyche. Days of hiking and playing in the woods at my grandparents’ house in Arkansas. Grandma would show us the places where gnomes4 and other woodsy-folk lived, and, of course, we believed. Or camping as a Boy Scout in central Texas, where I would shine a flashlight into the trees but the light could only reach so far. The sounds of owls and cracking limbs and critters in the dark… these memories still raise the hair on the back of my neck today.
I’m currently writing two stories that will require me to draw many plants and trees. One is a picture book about an insect that takes place in grass and trees, and the other is the middle-grade science fiction novel that I wrote about previously, where many of the big meaty scenes take place in a local woods, with trees and paths and rocks and a stream. A big theme of the story is the ecology and the connectedness of everything, and this will require some skill and practice to depict.
Every time I bike or run in my beloved Wissahickon Valley here in Philadelphia, I think about this, and I dread having to figure this out, and somehow capture the depth and the chaos as well as order of a patch of trees.
Sacha and I spent a weekend up in the Poconos, back in October, borrowing a friend’s house on a lake. The rear of the house faces a small lake with the opposite shoreline lined with yellow and red and gold trees mixed up among the lake houses. I took a stab at a small sketch while sitting at the window, with my relatively new Pilot 743 fountain pen, and I think I very much like this abstraction of the scene. Trees, but not trees. Shapes and ideas and indication of what’s there without getting caught up in specifics.
And another, a little more involved. There in the background, across the lake. The foreground is more specific, less successful, though I like that birch there on the right.
Another small one, which was actually the first one I drew, sort of getting the feel. More of a stand of small trees in the wind.
These were drawn in October, and I’ve since drawn several variations, both with ink and on the iPad, several of which i’m using to illustrate this post. Just like actual woods and forests, this is a deep subject on which I could spend a lot of time exploring.
A different tree
On that Poconos weekend, I bought a drawing at a flea market in Blakeslee PA that sort of started me down this path. It’s pen and ink on yellowing paper, nearly falling apart, and signed H.N. Kowitz 1969. Whoever H.N. Kowitz is, or was, took great care with this ink drawing. The complicated network of branches, the texture in the trunk. It reminded me immediately of the drawings I made in 1975 with Mayme. I paid $4 for this, and i’ll put a frame on it in the next few weeks.
Bonus tree content
A tree plays a big part in my picture book, My Hero, that was published by Dial in 2022. The book is about a little girl named Abigail who believes, sincerely, that she is a super hero. The story starts with seven straight spreads depicting a cat in a tree.
As with any major character in any book I write or illustrate, I drew many, many versions and variations of this tree. I enjoyed this process immensely.
Housecleaning
I have three siblings who all also write. Two of them, my older sister Laurie and my brother David, have recently launched substacks of their own. My sister is pursuing her MFA in creative writing at the University of Arkansas, and writes flash fiction. Her substack, I am assuming, will be about that and will include her fiction and collages.
My brother lives in Silver Spring, Maryland and will be writing about Italian Renaissance Swordplay.
I also have a younger sister, Erin, who lives in Seattle and who outdoes all of us by having kept a regular (non-Substack) blog for years.
Mayme also had shelves and shelves of National Geographic magazines that could easily satisfy an afternoon or two of childhood boredom, and lived in a house full of weird rocks and arrowheads she collected.
Not easy, necessarily. But simple. One isn’t always the other.
As writers, we can wait our entire lives for a pun as good as that one to just present itself. I’m so happy.
Hi Brian! My grand mother was an artist. I sometimes spent time with her and I remember her telling me how to draw trees and leaves. The main thing I remember that she said was that leaves are individuals they are not buckets hanging on branches. I guess she thought I was lazy in my depiction. haha.
I really enjoyed this one, thanks for sharing. I'm currently trying to figure out how best to draw tall grass without drawing each blade and it becoming overwhelming and distracting.