Wednesday 21 October 2009

Autumn and a Leafy drawing


8" x 11" Coloured Pencil on Hahnemulle Bamboo Paper

This drawing is derived from a bunch of leaves I gathered a few days ago in our local park. I did it quite quickly with a combination of Prismacolor and Derwent Coloursoft pencils. I would have done it on coloured paper but I wanted to try out this newish type of paper. It's fairly textured and I quite liked it but I wish it was available in colours other than white. I really wanted to put a background to it but a) it would have taken forever on white paper and b) I couldn't decide how on earth to do it! I took this photo of the Sycamore tree from whence the leaves came (the lady and her dog posed especially for me to give a sense of scale..... no they didn't really, I'm lying!).

And.......following the same theme, here's a pic I took last week of a magnificently old tree which takes pride of place at beautiful Ashridge Park, not far from where I live, in all its autumnal splendour.


As I'm in poetic mood, rare for me (!), and we are having an especially colourful autumn, I'll leave you with a verse from a poem called "Last Week in October" by Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) who is one of my favourite authors.
"The trees are undressing and fling in many places
On the gray road, the roof, the window-sill -
Their radiant robes and ribbons and yellow laces;
A leaf each second so is flung at will,
Here, there, another and another, still and still."


5 comments:

vesna said...

I like your fotos.Special which is automun,because i born at 5th september!

Gillian Mowbray said...

Your leaves are gorgeous - much trickier to do than people think.
Could you perhaps try doing a watercolour wash on the paper to give a colour background before adding the CP work?

Carolina said...

Hi Janet,
Your painted leaves are gorgeous, really (I agree with Gillian, leaves are tricky to paint, not easy), and your photos are lovely too :) (I totally baught that the lady was posing :)
Best regards,
Carolina

Janet Pantry said...

Thanks Vesna, Gillian and Carolina, I'm glad you like it! Yes, I've never drawn leaves before and did find them trickier than I expected. Doing a w/c wash first is a great idea - why didn't I think of that?!

Paula Pertile said...

Thank you for that bit of Thomas Hardy.
And your leaves are lovely, even with no background.
I don't think they need one.

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