Tag: pencil drawing

Leaf of the Day:The Maple

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This is my last post of January and I am glad I managed to keep up one drawing every day. I am now in England away from the internet so unable to post with an image for about 10 days but hopefully will be doing some drawing every day… English leaves this time. I will post the results when I return.

While doing my daily drawings I have been working, bit by bit, on a more detailed study. Like many other artists I chose a maple leaf to draw. My main reason was to have something that would not wilt immediately and which I could leave and come back to over a space of about a week.
This dried leaf is one of many that have been blowing around the apartment, they are not there for long as 3 men clad in combat gear with ferocious blowers come often to round up these offending untidy leaves. They are then put in the dumpster.. dustbin to us Brits. Just one of the many words which sometimes make my conversations here completely incomprehensible to both parties. Use of the ‘wrong’ words in America can land you in deep and embarrassing trouble… but then you know that!
It seems a shame in some ways to reduce the yellows and oranges of this pretty leaf to greys but it was interesting to try to work out the tonal values.
I had to photograph it this time and I find that many of the subtle tones are lost, but it’s not too bad.

I now have to move onto more complicated studies so posting a drawing every day will perhaps prove impossible but I am aiming for 5 a week in February… we will see !
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Maple Leaf

Leaf of the Day: Cabbage Palm Fern and Nature Printing

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This little fern frond is from the Cabbage Palm Fern which grows in the ‘boots’ of the palm trees all over Orlando. The boots are where the leaves have joined the trunk, providing a cleft for the fern to take root in. It grows in crevices and cracks of walls, in nooks and crannies of oak trees and anywhere it can get a bit of nutrient, but is at its prettiest decorating the trunks of the palms. This is again from the border at the bottom of the steps here. There are many beautiful ferns in Florida and its is tempting to make February a Florida Fern month.. maybe I will, but some of them are very complicated to draw!

On Saturday I found a good shop nearby which sells all sort of antiquities from Egyptian shabtis to dinosaur eggs. I picked up this fossilised fern there, embedded and preserved in slate, 310-280 million years old. It¡s from Pennsylvania, an amazing little bit of history for just a few dollars.


Nature Printing
It reminded me of the beautiful fern illustrations in Thomas Moore’s “The Ferns of Great Britain and Ireland” produced in London in 1855 by the difficult and laborious ‘nature printing’ process. Each engraving plate was made from an actual plant then hand coloured. Here is an example from the book and more examples in a article from the George Glazer Gallery here explaining the process. This would be fascinating to try.
I particularly like the way the stem has been just turned up in order to get the image to fit on the page. In a similar way Audubon had to arrange some of the larger birds like the flamingo in awkward poses to make them fit the ‘elephant ‘ format of the pages. Somehow there is a truthfulness here which is very engaging and has no artifice.

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Cabbage Palm Fern

Leaf of the Day: Aloe Rivierei

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This is only the top section of this fearsome leaf, again from Mead Gardens.
I am assuming this is the Rivierei because it was growing very close to the water and has very long slender leaves, rather than the shorter leaves with the fatter bases that the Aloe Vera plants have. Aloe Vera grows everywhere here and of course is very well know for its medicinal properties. There is large and dangerous one lurking at the bottom of the steps which accosts the skirts and trousers of unwary visitors.
The aloes are another huge group of plants with many different variations. The name means ‘bitter’ and, interestingly, the aloes were one of the plants used by the Egyptians in the embalming process. Their employment in the history in medicine is extensive and is something I will return to when I have another aloe to draw…as I surely will!

This drawing is 9 inches high and this small piece took up all of the sketch book page, so I think the whole leaf from top to bottom would be 25 to 30 inches long.
It’s very very tough, has thorns like saw teeth and did some damage to the inside of my handbag. The thorns themselves are red tipped.

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Aloe Rivierei

Leaf of the day: The Rubber Plant and some Alien Sex!

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This good leaf has been sitting quietly on the side of my desk for 2 days now, after I rescued it from a heap of thinnings. The gardener has been round the apartments cutting and pruning, ready for the new growth of spring which will no doubt gallop in apace once the weather warms up. It is showing some scars from the big ugly freeze with various cuts and bruises but I am glad to have immortalised this handsome sturdy leaf. It has quite a presence.
One of the most interesting aspects of living in a semi-tropical climate is that plants which you have only known in England as treasured and exotic house plants, carefully nurtured at some time, effort and anxiety, are here wantonly seeding themselves around and sometimes creating a bit of nuisance. Every bit of waste ground, every crack in the pavement and every neglected-for-a-second building will have some kind of exotic vegetation pushing up through it, scrambling over it and round it, insinuating itself into the basic fabric of the city. I saw a pretty little fan palm peeping out of an old lamppost base the other day. The ficus family is one of the main culprits.

My Ficus Elastica is a member of this interesting Fig family .. all of whom rely for pollination on a specific tiny fig wasp. Because it needs no other pollinators, the tree doesn’t bother much to produce big showy flowers. The tiny ‘flowers’ are clustered inside the fruit we call a fig, correctly called a ‘synconium’.
Normally these plants are propagated commercially by cuttings or air layering but I did find this alarming headline in the ‘New York Times’ by John Noble Wilsford, May 1988. If you want to read more go here
Its amazing what a little fig wasp can do!

‘ Aided by Alien Insects’
‘Alien fig wasps invading south Florida have perked up the sex life of the Ficus tree. They have what the trees had been missing: a knowing and generous way with pollen.

Naturally, this has led to a proliferation of little ficus trees, and they now threaten to overrun lawns, crowd out forest vegetation and send out implacable roots to undermine the concrete and brick foundations of society. ….

On the University of Miami campus at Coral Gables, more than 150 seedlings have been counted around nine large Ficus microcarpa trees,’Eternal Vigilance’ which had previously been infertile outside their native ground in the Asian tropics.
Doyle B. McKey, associate professor of biology at the University of Miami, said it would take ”eternal vigilance and constant maintenance” to contain the spread of Ficus, particularly in the suburbs, where it is already as familiar a part of the landscape as shrubs and trees. “

Friends, we live in dangerous times!

p.s. ‘Aliens’ and ‘Sex’!……I bet I am topping Google ratings today.
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The Rubber Plant

Leaf of the Day: Curly Croton

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My second croton. (the earlier one is here.) This one I like better. Its not quite the corkscrew variety which twists the whole way up the stem but this one does have one full turn. To my mind the individual leaves are more attractive than the plant as a whole. Their beautiful shapes can get lost in all that exuberant colour…but then the colours and patterns are wonderful too.

The colour of this one is extraordinary. A red background with dark green patches bordered in a yellowy green. The back of the leaf is deep magenta. It’s very beautiful. I will certainly return to these when I start working in colour. They are also known as Joseph’s Coat and are definitely the Jackson Pollock of the plant world.
I have read that the name Croton comes from the Greek word “tick”, because of the similarities of the seeds to dog ticks.. to be honest lots of seeds look like ticks to me! Its Latin name is Codiaeum Variegatum and it is part of the extensive Euphorbiaceam family apparently over 2000 varieties. I blanch at the prospect of all those leaves from just one genus. Some more information about them, if you are interested, is here from Waynes Word .
This one came from the shrubby borders of Park Avenue where I saw the squirrel yesterday. The council have kindly labeled some of the lovely trees which are planted at the roadside. .. but not the shrubs.

I had been to the Creadle School of Art today for my second ceramics class. I love working in clay but there is so much to learn. I´m on week two of the lumpen ashtray. I wont be sharing the results with you just yet.

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The Curly Croton

Leaf of the Day: Bauhinia or Butterfly Tree

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On the nearby charmingly named Gay Rd is a small retirement complex and this lovely tree must bring delight to whichever lucky resident has an adjacent room. I am presuming, from this leaf, that it is the Bauhinia purpurea: Purple Orchid-Tree
This genus of tree was named to honor the work of the Bauhini brothers, 16th century Swiss botanists and herbalists who each wrote extensively on horticulture and the use of plants.
There are many varieties of Bauhinia and in India, the Apta, as it is known, is celebrated both in myth and for its medical uses especially in ayurvedic medicine. In legend, the tree was showered with gold during a fight between Kuba the god of wealth and King Raghu. I think that is a very beautiful image and one of the observances of festival of Dussehra is the exchange of Apta leaves as a symbol of a gift of gold.

Leaf Description
This beautiful leaf is bi-lobed, so really made up of twin leaflets, joined in the middle and I have seen other examples that are more deeply divided. The interesting shape also earns it the name butterfly tree or more prosaically, cow’s foot. I have a proper botanical description of these leaves from the AgroForestryTree Database
“Leaves have minute stipules 1-2 mm, early caducous; petiole puberulous to glabrous, 3-4 cm; lamina broadly ovate to circular, often broader than long, 6-16 cm diameter; 11-13 nerved; tips of lobes broadly rounded, base cordate; upper surface glabrous, lower glaucous but glabrous when fully grown”

Taxonomy
And I am learning more about the taxonomy of plants too.. so here, for the scholarly, from the USA Department of Agriculture is the correct classification for the lovely butterfly tree.
Kingdom: Plantae ( plants)
Subkingdom: Trachebionta (Vascular plants)
Superdivision: Spermatophyta (Seed plants)
Division: Magnoliophyta (Flowering plants)
Class: Magnoliopsida (Dicotyledons)
Subclass: Rosidae
Order: Fabales
Family: Fabaceae (pea)
Genus: Bauhinia
Species: Bauhinia purpurea (butterfly tree)

There is so much to learn and understand… what joy!____________________________________________

The Butterfly Tree

Leaf of the Day: Chinese Holly, a glabrous leaf.

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As I left the supermarket this morning, a little white dog, who was enthusiastically sniffing the planted borders of the car park, sprang up in the air like a rocket, yelped and fled back to his owner. I wanted to investigate and thought it just might be the extremely venomous and to-be-avoided-at-all-costs, diamond backed rattle snake. I took a rather tentative look as today, of course, I had forgotten to bring with me my professional snake tongs and sack. Thankfully there was no snake but an aggressive and very ferocious Chinese Holly bush which resisted my attempts to snatch a leaf with grim determination.
However here are 3 leaves, gathered at some personal cost as this low lying dense and prickly shrub has leaves of steel with needle like sharp points which stick out all directions and directly in to your flesh.

My plan for the leaf chart will have to wait for a day or two but this holly is a very good example of a leaf with a glabrous surface .. yes… glabrous means smooth and in botanical terms is the opposite to pubescent which of course means hairy! There are many different grades of hairiness and I look forward to my first samples of floccose, strigose and villous leaves.

Sitting on my drawing table these funny leaves looked like bizarre and aggressive insects. Their Latin name is ilex cornuta.. ‘cornuta’ meaning horned, very appropriate.
My aim here is to show the top surface as smooth and shiny, the underside as duller and paler. I have not exaggerated the spines.
For those wishing to hear the name beautifully said in Italian go here!!!!! I am finding some more and exciting audio clips to add occasionally so stay tuned.
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Chinese Holly

Leaf of the Day: Firecracker and Tornados

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Yesterday evening a storm swept over Winter Park bringing with it ominous warnings from the weather man of possible “tornadic” activity. The rain was torrential and we had a spectacular display of thunder and lightening, so it’s quite apt that today’s leaf ( if you can spot one ) is from the Firecracker bush.

This untidy plant, russelia equisetiformis, flops over and through the railings near the pool and I have hesitated to draw it before as I couldn’t find the leaves. Well they are there.. but very tiny and referred to in one book as ‘scale like’. At regular intervals along the main stem there are 5 little leaves arranged in a whorled formation. 5 stems radiate from the leaf bases and these in turn bear two or three of the brilliant red tubular flowers which give this bush its name. My sample here was somewhat bedraggled after the storm and the plant is not looking its best, but new growth is starting with a very upright, thicker new main stem and with more pronounced leaves.

Tomorrow I am planning another leaf chart. I am keen to explore the word.. glabrescent; ie becoming glabrous in age.. I am sure you are too!
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Firecracker Bush

Leaf of the Day: Sacred Bamboo

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I used to grow Sacred Bamboo or Nandina in my little garden in Deal in England. It had lovely winter orangy red colours in the foliage with cheerful red berries and delicate little flowers. The plant has a light and airy feel about it, but does not really look much like bamboo and is not related..although I did read somewhere that it was used in the manufacture of chop sticks. This one is, again, from the varied borders round the apartment. I am going to venture further very soon.

This is one leaf. A compound bipinnate leaf. I have yet to do the “leaf composition chart”.. but its comforting to know I have a sample of the bipinnate variety!
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Sacred Bamboo

Leaf of the Day: Long Leaf Pine Needles

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I am trying to get the full set of leaf shapes and this is an example of an acicluar, or needle shaped leaf. I was waiting for the bus on Denning Road this morning and saw these fallen pine needles scattered around the pavement. I noticed that all of them came in sets of three, joined together at the end, and were incredibly long and beautiful. I think this is the Long Leaf Pine, Pinus palustris.

Pine needles are used here in America to make some wonderful baskets. I do so admire the American love and respect for craft at its highest level.
Teri Thompson , a Florida artist has some beautiful baskets here

However, these 12 inch long slender needles would not fit on my 9 x 9 inch sketch book so I have had to move onto the 14 x 17 inch one. Now this poses the problem of scanning, as my basic scanner/printer is only A4. I had to scan this one in two sections but the glass bed of the scanner is slightly lower than its surround which means that anything near the edge tends to be sightly out of focus. Pencil drawings are very difficult to reproduce well, even with professional equipment and I may have to photograph the larger ones now… does anyone have any hints?
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Long Leaf Pine