OVERVIEW:

Trees with their thousands of leaves, confound us with sensory overload and a common reaction when attempting to draw them might be: ‘Well, where do I even start?’

The good news is that seemingly chaotic subjects all have patterns, which can unlock the object and provide us with a clue into the structure of its particular chaos. If we can recognise the essence of something then it is easier to summon a convincing presence of it on our paper.

In this four day workshop, we’ll be looking at making forests come alive on paper with graphite pencils. Starting by outlining a vision, we’ll progressively get more in depth with our drawings, going from sketch, to exploring light and shadows all the way to playing with texture and detail.

Guided step by step through playful exercises, you’ll build skills while uncovering the principles behind them. With characters, challenges, and a relaxed atmosphere, this journey is designed to awaken your inner artist.

WORKSHOP BREAKDOWN:

Lesson One - Start Small

After a short introduction and some warm up exercises, we’ll spend this lesson developing small thumbnail ideas for generating a good composition for our forest.

Lesson Two - Drawing Trunks and Branches

The trunk of a tree can come in many forms, we’ll explore the ways in which we can develop texture, using a few extra tools.

Similar to the trunk, branches can take many forms, so we’ll explore ways to give them a convincing three dimensional presence, allowing them to twist and turn naturally.

Lesson Three - Drawing Foliage

Trees need leaves and so, this lesson will be all about ways that we can create clumps of leaves to populate our forest scene.

Lesson Four - Drawing a Forest

The thumbnail that we established in lesson one will come back to haunt us, in a good way! We’ll start to develop a slightly larger drawing from that initial sketch.

About the teacher:

Ashley Edge is a Lake District based artist and the author of the self published Draw Like a Boss series of books turning learning to draw into a fun quest. He did a BA in illustration and Animation but it felt somehow incomplete. A fan of video games, Ash started studying academic drawing in his free time and eventually developed his own drawing formula blending the discipline of classic art with the playful spirit of gaming. With Zelda and Monkey Island as inspiration, he created the kind of books he wished he had had when he was learning. Over the course of 10 years Draw Like a Boss has sold over 15,000 books helping people learn to draw.