If I’m drawing from life, I can sometimes get intimidated by the complexity of what I’m looking at. If the subject here were just the tree on the left, I could concentrate on that, but there’s a forbidding forest of mast-sprouting boats behind it. Part of why I selected this subject was to face my fear.

I try to draw something like this hierarchically – that is, I resist the temptation to dive right into the details, and I lay in some really big shapes first, making sure that no area of the picture is ignored as I add increasingly smaller and more complicated shapes.

The foreground “hero” boat became my main focus, so I concentrated on that the most. The tree on the left makes a nice framing device, but it kept looking flat to me, so I periodically added marks to it that I thought would evoke solidity. When you’re doing something like this, you strike a balance between adding details inspired by what you can actually see and adding cues from your store of knowledge. (Those “cross-section” marks near the top of the tree weren’t really there, but I thought they’d help sell the tree’s volume.)

I didn’t start the foreground railing until near the end since it obscured so much of the main boat.

Posting your work is so important. Just as you don’t know what your writing really feels like until you print it out on paper, you don’t learn fully from your work until you post it. Invariably, after I’ve put it out for all to see, I notice room for improvement. Here I felt that a shadow on the left side of the railing would have added depth between the tree and the railing (even though that shadow wasn’t there!). This brings up an extremely important point. If you want to improve, quantity is more important than quality in your output. Don’t get too hung up on any one drawing or painting. If you learn something from it, resist the temptation to rework it and apply your knowledge to the next one!

If you have any questions, please ask away!

I painted this with Procreate software on an iPad Pro. Procreate can be set to record your marks, so here’s a process video of this picture:

Daunting Subjects