Assignment: Crazy Tree

1/24/21 "crazy tree" from imagination

Another assignment in Kathleen Moore’s class that involved drawing from imagination was this “crazy tree,” which followed a thorough lesson in drawing branches. Much of the lesson’s information was review for me from the half year that I studied landscape drawing with Suzanne Brooker. The big difference is that in Suzanne’s classes, we drew only from photo references. In outdoor photos, the actual sun is always present somewhere, as are the shadows.

In Kathleen’s exercise, we were to draw an imaginary tree with crazy-growing branches, but make the branches realistic in terms of their shapes. The assignment was also intended as practice in showing where the branches are in space using perspective, foreshortening and shading. It was an extremely fun challenge to imagine the light source and apply light logic to shade the unreal tree realistically.

Beyond my general desire to improve my skills in drawing trees, this exercise gave me a good meaty chew on working on my skills in drawing realistically from my head without a visual reference. I want to do more of this on my own.