Brian

A quick sketch of my Dracaena Marginata, also known the dragon tree, more often know as Brian.


Brian, 2011

The writing's on the wall

I carried out a commission today in South London to paint a mural based on one of my London Plane drawings. Somehow it took half the time of the original drawing, which was a fraction of the size, so perhaps I need to up the scale of my work.

This is for a baby's bedroom - I hope it's not too terrifying for him.

Illustreeous

Some experimentation in Illustrator last year that I'd forgotten about. I can't find the original files, only printouts that were buried in a folder I was looking through yesterday. I drew the bare tree image, and then played around with Illustrator's brushes by creating different leaf images and setting the colours to vary as I painted with them.

I've photoshopped these images to clean them up a bit post-scanning, but quite liked the paper image of the second one, so I've left that relatively untouched.


Illustreeous 1, 2008


Illustreeous 2, 2008


Illustreeous 3, 2008


Illustreeous 4, 2008

London Plane 2

I had another go at drawing a London Plane and got more carried away this time, finding it hard to stop adding more and more branches. The dangling things look a bit like musical notes.

(NB: you can view larger versions of the images by clicking them)


London Plane


London Plane (Detail)

Hampstead Heath

I took advantage of the freakily nice weather last Sunday and visited Hampstead Heath, which seemed not to have been the most original idea judging by the number of other people there.

On my way out, I spotted some very interesting trees (no idea what they were - probably something really obvious like oaks), and took lots of photos of them. This drawing was done from one such photo. What really looked odd about them was that the little balls (conkers? I don't know) were hanging from branches that had created almost perfect right-angles. These shapes seemed to go against the otherwise typically organic shapes you would expect from a tree.

TREE UPDATE: It sounds like this is a 'London plane' (thanks Jeff)


London plane