You Can Draw in 30 Days: The Fun, Easy Way to Learn to Draw in One Month or Less (39 page)

Start with the curving horizon line, and begin sketching the near craters lower on the paper and larger to make them appear much closer to your eye. Draw the distant craters smaller and higher, making them appear farther away. Be sure to overlap the near craters over the far craters. Notice how my dark nook and cranny shadows help separate the craters.

Now take a look at how Michele Proos used the coffee mug lesson to draw her real-life “still life.” Great job!

Look at how these students practiced this lesson in their sketchbooks.

E
ver since I was ten years old, I’ve been obsessed with drawing trees. I’ve always been fascinated with the aboveground root canals of the giant fig trees, the gnarly knotholes and deep trunk wood grain on the great oaks, and the whispering, dangling leaves of the weeping willows. In this lesson I will introduce you to the joy of drawing a simple tree with a tapered trunk and overlapping textured clumps of leaves.

Trees surround us, shelter us, warm us, oxygenate us, and provide abundantly for our lives. From the table I’m sitting at and chair I’m sitting on, to the paper you are drawing on, trees are fundamental to our way of life. On my website (
www.markkistler.com
), I’ve posted several tree planting organizations that my kids and I are a part of. I encourage you to take a look at these (Google “tree planting organizations”) and consider joining one. With this lesson I hope to encourage you to go outside and plant a tree in your yard, your friend’s yard, your kid’s school, or your place of worship. But first let’s draw an inspiring tree!

 

 

 

1. Draw the trunk of the tree tapering out at the bottom.

2. Curve the bottom with a contour line. This will serve as the guide line for the tree’s root system.

3. Using the bottom of the contour curve, draw guide lines in drawing directions NE, SE, NW, and SW as I have illustrated.

4. Is this fascinating or what? Draw your tree’s root system with long extending tapering tubes out from the trunk, following your drawing direction compass lines. Have you noticed that we use drawing direction lines for just about every object we draw in 3-D?

5. Erase your extra guide lines. Draw the branches tapering smaller and splitting off into smaller branches as I have illustrated here. Notice that I’ve drawn overlapping wrinkles where the branches split off to identify the overlapping edge more clearly.

6. Sketch a circle to designate where the first cluster of leaves will go.

7. Sketch two more circles behind your first circle: the power of grouping. Essentially, a group of three clumps will look visually more appealing than a single clump.