Day 142: A Sunset Tree

Today’s sketch is just sort of a doodle that I pulled out of my head.  I couldn’t really think of anything that I wanted to draw.  In the end I decided to try drawing a tree from the imagination again.  That’s something I haven’t tried for a long time.  I also need quite a bit of practice with it because I have a lot of very bad habits to unlearn when it comes to drawing trees.  I was struggling with those for this drawing.  I kept finding myself drifting into bad habits and then trying to correct.  I think the result is at least a little bit better than my usual tree drawing though.

Once I had drawn the tree I decided that there ought to be someone sitting under it so I tried to draw a figure.  That’s something I’m still quite bad at.  As long as I keep my distance though so that I don’t have to worry about any details I can generally get a reasonable impression of a human figure.  Then for some reason I decide that the sun was setting on my little scene.  It’s a bit strange since I was trying to have my figure reading a book.  I suppose she’s engulfed in her book, trying to finish the chapter by the last light of the evening sun before heading back home.  It’s fitting since I made her quite a lot like me and I used to read by the headlights of cars behind us on the highway when I was on road trips with my parents as a teenager.

Unfortunately I started getting a bit tired of the painting process partway through.  I need to try to start my sketches earlier in the day so that I can finish them before running out of energy.  The watercolours are challenging for that because at certain times I have to wait to let the paint and paper dry.  I don’t deal well with disruptions like that when I’m in the middle of something.  Oh well, I got the colours all wrong anyway.  This is just what happens when you don’t use any references and try to draw something purely out of your imagination.