Line abstraction with trees.

I love to doodle.  Sometimes I don't feel like making art that requires a lot of deep thought.  I just want something to work on while I watch TV or listen to music. Doodling's how I relax.

I have those wonderful tree pictures and decided to do a large doodle about them.
1.  Use a pencil to create a simple sketch of the tree.
2.  Go over all lines with a black Sharpie marker
3.  Add a horizon line and some smaller trees in the background.  This will give you some visual depth and interest.

4.  Cover the whole surface with white paint - Gesso or tempra.  You want it to be a bit translucent so you can see the ghost of the black lines through it.  You can barely see the lines in the picture on the left.

 5.  Now you're going to work in the negative space around the big tree.  First I used a light blue marker in the area that would be the sky.
6.  Then I used a dark blue marker for the the background trees.  Notice I used straight parallel lines (hatched) for the sky and curved ones for the tree trunks.
7.  For the ground I used wavy parallel lines in green.

 

8.  On the large tree I used a black marker and a continuous squiggly line starting with the large trunk.  I continued on each of the smaller trunks with more lines.

 Here's the finished work.  I'm not sure if I'm done yet or ready to move on to a new tree project.  I'll decide that tomorrow.