Weeping Sequoia (and the Case of the Missing Thumbnails)

8/4/20 Maple Leaf neighborhood

If you’ve read any books or taken any classes in drawing from observation, this advice will be familiar to you: Make thumbnails to help you plan a composition; it takes only a few minutes but could save you much time on the final drawing. Heck, I’ve taken entire workshops on the subject of thumbnails and why they are useful. Learning and doing, however, are different matters.

This fantastic weeping sequoia – a tree that was surely designed by Dr. Seuss – was my main interest here, my “story” for this sketch. I thought I’d put a car or two in the foreground to give the composition some depth, but somehow I ended up drawing all the cars, which took more time than I wanted, given that they didn’t interest me at all. Meanwhile, I lost the sun that was darting in and out of clouds. And my sequoia is now a tiny part of the picture.

If I had followed the thumbnail advice, I would have seen this problem in a few seconds and might have instead come up with a more horizontal composition, like the one I cropped below. Actually, I prefer best the composition I made of it four years ago.

Live and don’t learn, I guess.