Category Archive

The leaves I drew yesterday were so shiny that I didn’t want to stop with a line drawing, but went back and added the shadows, shades and sheen. So here is the Western red cedar again.

Scientific name Platycladus orientalis. The branch is so beautiful, I longed to draw every detail. That lasted for, well, you can see. A few twiglets.

I need to copy works of some of the great draftspeople to learn better how to combine detail and a more impressionistic approach. It’s so mysterious to me.

This is yesterday’s drawing, because last night was so packed with packing and work deadlines. We are on the road. Oriental arborvitae kept me happy as we waited for a delayed flight, and tonight I’ll be in another state and draw the next one.

These leaves take my breath away.

And I am at the back page of the sketchbook my daughter gave me a year or two ago. The last entry: a weeping branch of Chamaecyparis nootkatensis.

. . . which isn’t a cedar. At least, it’s not of the genus Cedrus. Quite a few conifers not in that genus get called cedars anyway, and this is one of them. It is a member of the genus Chamaecyparis, making it a cypress, though there too, the common name of “cypress” and the family, Cupressaceae, do not consistently correspond to each other. Maybe frequent commenter ERP will work through the tangle of what is and is not a cypress or a member of Cupressaceae.

In any case, for a tree to belong to this genus, Chamaecyparis, it must have scale-like leaves in adulthood, which means that here on my 55th tree, I have at last moved on from needles! This drawing feels like a schematic; I was just learning how these little scales fit together. What’s the pattern, and how does it change when a new twig (twiglet?) branches off? It’s fun to learn it. I will get a lot more familiar with them over the next few weeks, because there are 23 other trees with scale-like leaves here in western North America.

The leaves, that is, the scales, of the Port-Orford-cedar are tiny: about 1/16″ each.

Common name: Sugi, or Japanese cedar.

I love the overall pattern of these needles en masse: the way the twigs bend in waves and curls. I struggle to portray big-picture patterns like that, so I tried using broad strokes, literally. And at a distance I think it approximates the movement of this tree. Here’s the reference photo–which I couldn’t look at at exactly the same time that I was drawing. Having to switch back and forth also helped/compelled me to draw the shape and pattern of the whole rather than zeroing in on details.

It’s Saturday night. This is all a hardworking minister can do.