Sketching Trees and Leaves Through the Seasons

A tree is the most patient sitter you will ever draw. It never shifts its shoulder, never asks to see the sketch halfway through, and it is standing somewhere within a ten-minute walk of your front door. Best of all, it changes. Come back to the same oak in February and again in July and you have not one subject but four, each with its own lessons about line, shape and tone.

This is a gentle way into sketching from life, and it suits beginners and hobby artists particularly well. You do not need to travel anywhere remarkable. You need one tree, a pencil, and the willingness to return.

Start With What Is Outside Your Window

Resist the urge to hunt for a spectacular view. Instead, pick a single tree you pass often — a lime on the pavement, a hawthorn in the corner of a park, the sycamore at the end of the road. Sketching the same trunk across a year will teach you far more than a dozen scattered landscapes, because you will start to notice the small changes: where the bark splits, which branch died last summer, how the shadow creeps across the pavement as the season turns.

Work small. An A5 sketchbook with cartridge paper of 130gsm or heavier takes pencil and light washes without buckling. An HB pencil for line, a 2B for mid-tones and a 4B for the darkest darks will cover almost everything. Keep it in your bag and it will get used.

Winter: Learning to Read the Skeleton

From November to March, trees show you their structure. This is the best time to be a beginner, because there are no leaves to hide behind.

• Draw the gaps, not the branches. Look at the shapes of sky trapped between twigs and draw those instead. It sounds odd; it works brilliantly.
• Find the first fork. Hold your pencil at arm's length to compare the height of the trunk with the spread of the canopy before you commit a single line.
• Keep the imperfections. Knots, stubs of old branches, patches of lichen, the twist where a limb was lost — these are what make a tree look like an individual rather than a diagram.

Use light pressure with the HB and build slowly, then press harder with the 4B along the underside of the main branches. Cold hands? Fingerless gloves and a shorter session will do more for your drawing than stubborn endurance.

Spring: Buds and the First Green

Spring arrives in stages, and each stage is worth a page. Hazel catkins in February, blackthorn blossom before its leaves, the sticky buds of the horse chestnut unfurling into something almost tropical.

Draw a single twig at life size, running diagonally across the page, and add short notes beside it. Ash buds are black and soot-like; beech buds are long, sharp and copper; oak buds cluster at the tips of the twigs. Those small observations will make your summer drawings more convincing later, because you will know how the leaves are arranged and which direction the branch was heading.

For colour, hold back. New growth is a soft, yellow-green, and the temptation to reach for a strong green will flatten it. A pale wash laid over a light pencil drawing is often enough.

Summer: Masses, Gaps and Dappled Light

Summer is the hardest season, simply because there is so much of it. The trick is to squint until the leaves blur into clumps. Then draw the clumps — five or six shapes, not five thousand leaves.

• Group the foliage into rounded masses and note which ones catch the light and which sit in shadow.
• Leave paper white for the brightest patches. It is far easier to keep white paper than to get it back.
• Vary your marks. Close hatching for deep shade, loose scribbles for the outside edge of a canopy, a few sharp stippled dots for leaves catching sun.

Draw one leaf properly as well: the midrib, the veins branching off, the serrated edge, the small curl where it twists towards the light. Sit in the shade while you do it, and let the drawing take twenty minutes rather than two.

Autumn: Colour, Fallen Leaves and Shorter Days

As the light drops and the leaves turn, sketch quickly. Colour shifts fast in October.

With coloured pencils, layer rather than press. A yellow base, then orange over the top, then a little red in the shadowed areas will give you a richer result than one heavy stroke of orange. On the ground, fallen leaves overlap in loose ellipses — draw the ones on top first, then tuck the edges of the ones beneath. A single leaf drawn each day for a week, five minutes at a time, will improve your observation faster than almost anything else.

Look, too, at the twigs once the leaves have gone. The horseshoe-shaped leaf scars on a horse chestnut twig are like small, tidy drawings in themselves.

Keeping a Seasonal Sketchbook Going

The habit matters more than any single drawing. Date every page, note the weather and the light, and jot down one thing that has changed since your last visit. Ten or twenty minutes a fortnight is plenty.

A photograph flattens a tree into a shape. A sketch holds the cold of the morning, the noise of the road behind you, and the exact moment you noticed the buds had opened. Keep your tools cheap, your lines loose, and your eraser in your pocket. The whole point is to look, and to keep looking.