This Drawing Business

Since May I have been trying to loosen up my drawing style as I am keen to get into children's illustration and also add another dimension to my college work (see previous post). Well my first attempts to start a sketchbook were scuppered by my 15 month old daughter who found my book (she likes rooting through my bag) and took it as her own. It is now full of doodles which is wonderful but not quite what I had in mind. And the few drawings I had done in there weren't much to look at anyway so maybe she was doing me a favour. Thank goodness she hadn't found my new rotring!

I'd attempted this piece below a couple of months ago with my new box of gouache which I was happy with until I got to the lollipops, ahem, trees. So I added leaves over the top in pencil which although looks interesting didn't really solve the problem. Actually this is the second attempt, the first one I binned it was so awful (god it's like college all over again). Then I attempted to add the shadow under the tree but forgot that gouache isn't always like watercolour and instead of adding a wash I washed the previous layer out - disaster!

So armed with my second new sketchbook and my other half who was home last week and could watch the kids I decided the best place to start is with trees

and I must say I'm quite pleased with it. Not perfect but it does look like a tree and using a pen rather than pencil forced me to draw quickly and not worry that I hadn't drawn every single leaf. (Please ignore the bin behind the bench, it's twice the size it ought to be but I'm leaving it there. Ouch.)