Painters Online

CHALLENGE 00 7 SKETCHING & PAINTINGGUIDE APRIL 2020 www.painters-online.co.uk Trees by Adebanji Alade I f people are my first love, trees are second! I see them as living monsters. They break up the unified sky space in a landscape and add powerful compositional elements that help in balancing all the parts in a painting. I can’t count the number of times I have used trees in my urban landscapes to show scale, hide detail, create a centre of interest, to direct the eye of the viewer through shadows, or to show the effect of light on a particular place. I am always looking out for scenes with trees because they help to break up a picture that might otherwise be over-saturated with straight lines and linear perspective. They make it easier to paint urban scenes by taking a lot away from the complexity of buildings and other structures. Taken from The Addictive Sketcher by Adebanji Alade (Search Press, 2020). See page 2 for details. ▲ At Upper Belvedere in Kent, there is a lovely All Saints’ church with a grand old tree. This is the trunk of the tree. I sat right nearby and captured it with graphite in my sketchbook. I love tree trunks because they give me room to explore textures and shading with lines of various weight and thickness. ▲ These twin trees are very short and stunted. They caught my eye as I walked along Fulham Broadway into King’s Road. They were almost identical, so I honed in on one and made the other lighter. I worked in graphite, using the broad stroke technique for the leaves. With this technique, the marks the pencil makes are very similar to those produced with strokes of a flat square brush. I make sure that the pencil is sharpened to a point where it can deliver a stroke parallel to the surface, so that when the mark is made, it sits smoothly on the surface of the paper, resembling a brushstroke. ▲ Morning Light, Palm Trees. A scene from Paphos, Cyprus.