Union Bay Natural Area Sketches

Aprl 12
Overcast.

A trip to Union Bay natural area provided an opportunity to practice using sketches as a natural history tool. The reasons for continuing to use sketches and hand made visual representation remain applicable because it gives the naturalist a chance to be subjective in the way they are interpreting hat they see, and to highlight features to increase the emphasis of certain aspects of a visual. It is important to realize that sketching is a tool that can be perfected with practice, so in UBNA, We practiced drawing critters, and plants of our choice using a few standard technques. The first was to be objective to the certain parts of something, and not to make assumptions of what something looks lke just because you know what it is. The second one, which practiced by drawing a willow tree, was to draw a set of increasingly zoomed in sketches f the same organism, thereby focusing on different levels of its characteristics from various distances. first drew the overarching shape of the willow tree, very recognizeable. Then I drew in more detail one of the branches such that you could see that it as comprised of bunches of curled leaves. Then I depicted one leafy bunch and how it unfolded from the stem, and then finally, the detail of an individual leaf.
I intend to practice this for a catalog of trees, admittedly a large project, because I am not a gifted artist.

Posted on June 5, 2012 03:11 PM by robertmarsh