Trees And Shrubs Entourage

Line Drawing Exercise

This is probably the most important exercise you will ever come across for improving your line drawing.

This is the moment when you will get to the next level for yourline drawing.

So, the way this exercise works it that you have multiple abstract compositions where you will get to improve your line drawing.

You need to be able to have a line drawing which has gradients by itself, without any help from hatching.
So if until now we drew staring, clear lines which were either construction lines, contour lines or thick lines and focused on hatching for a gradient… we can switch to a more sensitive drawing style by means of having a gradient through the line drawing.

The abstract compositions need to be thoroughly studied so you understand where each line has different inflexions – either getting darker or lighter.

It also matters to not lift your pencil off the page – the key to getting the line drawing sorted is to have a continuous line drawing and be able to vary it in accordance with the context.

The top exercises are the ones with the spirals that are continuous and need to diverge into looking 3D… these will help you with a lot of things – spontaneous composition, understanding that things overlap when drawing them – so you will have larger spirals, smaller spirals etc

Another thing you can do is draw the rectangular variant of this composition, so it will have the same consistent, ‘no pen off the page’ line drawing, but with rectangles instead of spirals.
You can do all the other exercises, and I advise you actually go through each of them three times at least.

Shrubs

We will start the trees entourage with drawing a simple shrub.

You need to draw several ellipses overlapped and then do the foliage hatching around the generated volume. We do this because we want to get an approximate idea of how the general shape of the shrub will look like.

There are people out there that just want to whip out a marker and start sketching the general shape of the shrub and that’s it… I would recommend a more studied approach as it makes it creates more reliable and easy-to-learn entourage.

After we are done with the general outline we will draw the trunk of the shrub – which are multiple lines starting from the ground and going in the shrub – these are the structural elements for our shrub – next up we need to hatch the volume shadow, which is around the bottom third of the shrub and the cast shadows around it.

You can leave a white outline around the shadowed part of the shrub, not wider than 3 mms for graphical effects. Also, add small triangles around the bottom of the shrub to simulate leaves falling and make the drawing more dynamic.

Facade Trees

Next, we will move up to drawing trees for facades – these will be around 8 cm tall and not feature whole lot of detailing… we will keep that for later.

There are three types of trees – background (which can double as these facade trees), midground – which are reasonably detailed and be just complementing your building and the foreground trees which just add a strong foreground and you can either see them as a border or they can just be represented by a branch sticking out and giving your drawing more 3d.

So the face trees can be drawn as cylinders, triangles, rectangles and leaf shapes… You need to draw the general sylouette , do the foliage hatching and then go for drawing branches and the tree trunk.

The tree trunk has a thicker line drawing and the branches are just simple lines.

Then you start hatching a third of the tree, leaving that white edge around the shadow part and a white third opposing to that, where the light directly hits our curvilinear volume.

Same goes throughfor all shapes – triangle, oval, rectangle etc.

You can mix facade trees and simple shrubs to get very good endground entourage which will hide the horizon line for any perspective of a building.

Planar Trees

There are multiple ways of drawing trees for planar view – and doing a short search on google images or Pinterest for ‘architecture trees entourage drawing’ will give you hundreds upon hundreds of examples.

The way you’ll learn to draw trees from me will be better as again, it is more flexible – you learn this and can then vary your approach to include any type of entourage you would like.

We will draw three types of trees in our exercise – the main, large trees, some evergreens and some shrubs. These three types will be located on an inclined plane – so you will have multiple terrain curves and so on.

The large type of tree is going to look like a circle with branches spanning out from the middle – the main breaches are thicker and span out into smaller branches… all drawn with a crisp and clear line drawing.

Let’s take two steps back – we will be applying the four-step formula for drawing all of these trees – so a clear construction and contour line, hatching (which is either black &white or coloured) and rethickening of the original lines.

The radius for a tree should be 2-3 cm
We will draw the contour of the first type of tree with foliage line and then proceed to hatching. We need to first decide where the light source is so we can draw the cast shadows – these will be offset circles which have the same radius as our tree.

When we hatch we hatch the opposite side of the one directly hit by light – and it has the same principles as before – add some greys and a white contour separating the shadowed area from the outline of the tree.

Rethicken the line drawing and that’s it -done.

Terrain Curves

I recommend you draw the entourage we learned about on a patch of ground which features terrain curves. These are the lines that show the height of the terrain fluctuating and changing.

Graphics-wise, drawing terrain curves means drawing terraces and inclined areas.

Terraces are the horizontal levels of the terrain – here you just hatch the terrain and that’s basically it.
Inclined areas means that there is a slope to the area – the way you draw this is by using random inclined lines which show how the area is changing level and texture.

These lines are random and should follow the curvature of the inclined area.

Coloured Shrubs And Planar Trees

These are drawn in clusters – so you best start off with drawing many adjacent circles that form a cluster of minimum of 5 circles. These need to be in large amount as the read more easily as shrubs.
The radius of a shrub should be 0.5-0.7 cm.

When you draw the contour of a shrub, make sure to draw it polygonal – so it is either an octagon, hexagon etc. The reason you do this is to make the shrubs stand out in planar view.

When you thicken the line drawing, make sure to thicken the whole perimeter of shrubs so you read them all as one piece in your drawing – this is the trick, they are one piece and individual elements at the same time.

Coloured Large Trees Entourage

These count as midground trees, as they could complement a building you draw and design.
You need to, again, overall a couple of ellipses so you get the general shape of the foliage, then start drawing the tree trunk and branches.

All branches span out, and as they grow taller they are also thinner – be careful because drawing branches will likely create a lot of optical illusions – you will forget to draw them thinner, you will create local symmetry etc. Careful to correct yourself as you move along.

Also, don’t forget that you will see the underlying part of the foliage, so you would best hatch the part where the branches fit into the foliage, then the third where the shadow fits.

Same thing as the other volumes – third with hatching and the 2-3 mm white contour, the light area – all of these in relation to where your light source is.
You can hatch a bit on the general foliage and also draw certain spots in the foliage where you can see through and you have branches.
The branches should be long enough to fit all the way through the whole foliage and get a lot thinner as they move up.

The tree trunk should have a wood texture and shadow for itself, but maintain a white colour despite you hatching everything else on your drawing.

For evergreens, you start off the same – by drawing a circle but then you get the effect of an evergreen by hatching lines that start from the centre of the evergreen and spread out radially. The third of the evergreen which fits the shadowed part and is darker. You can overlap radial hatching on top of the standard lines hatching to get more of the curvature effect for the evergreen.

The radius of an evergreen should be around 1 – 1,5 cm
Don’t forget, cast shadows for evergreen are triangular in shape with the triangle’s height matching the assumed height of the evergreen, in contrast to regular trees’ shadows which are just an offset circle.

 Foreground Trees

The foreground trees act as a strong foreground for your architecture perspective.

These can either be a boundary that limits the outline of one of your drawings – and thus creates an interesting effect that breaks the rigidity of lines or can be just a branch or an element that overlaps on top of your main perspective.

The way you draw a branch is similar to how you draw a tree – imagine the branch as literally a detailed tree trunk that grows to one side. This means you need to be careful with the sticking points you would have at drawing a regular tree:
– Make sure the branches are thinner as they span out.
– Don’t forget to avoid symmetry and all optical illusions at all costs.
– Add wood fibre texture to the branch, make it look like it’s got a lot of information going. Add volume shadows on the branch on top of all that.

After you draw the branch you need to add foliage on top. Here you have two options – either you construct the outline of the foliage and using the foliage line just leave the foliage part mostly white… so it contrasts with the hatching of the sky and so on.

Or you can colour the foliage. The easiest way to do this is by using a coloured marker – and I would start with a decent green colour.
Use the same green and overall multiple layers of colour or you can use three different tints of green and overall those – light green, dark and very dark.

Don’t forget about how to apply marker – you got three techniques for that.
Dots – this means you just apply the colour punctually in multiple dot shapes.
Marker ‘hatching’ – this is just like drawing the foliage lien but only with markers – this creates that interesting effect with just applying simple marker.

Lines

But he way , if I wasn’t clear in the first run, you can’t hatch with markers as you would do with apencil- marker is a wet media so it has a different way of application for a large surface. Here is where lines kick in – drawing lines is the most efficient way you can apply marker with an even tone on a large area of your drawing. Don’t forget to also interrupt the line drawing from time to time to get some breathing space on your drawing. Trust me, these interrupted lines look really really good and add to the general graphics.

Difficulty: Noobie to Intermediate

Video Time: 3:13:59

In this video you will learn about how to correctly construct a detailed isometric axonometric at line-drawing level. This exercise will continue in the next lesson with adding cast and volume shadows.

• Entourage has that 80% the same as every other drawing we have studied until now, but it also has that 20% specific sensitive part. You need to apply what we learned about constructing volumes and then take things to the next level by adapting your line drawing and hatching so the end result looks sensitive and artistic like a tree.
• Get out of your confort zone massively – you need to make this lesson the only time in your life when you practice 100% on entourage – draw all the trees, all the shrubs even if you consider them to be useless at this point… Learning all this different entourage will take all your work to the next level.

• You will not want to construct shrubs or trees, you will draw them instinctually like how you feel it. Of course you should draw how you feel them, but at the same time what happened to what we have learned all the way here? You need to constantly balance both in all the work you will ever do… I suggest starting with just copying the entourage I show you then moving on to your own ideas.
• Your line drawing will not be fluent enough to draw good entourage. You need to understand that half of this exercise is about upgrading your line drawing. Do the line drawing exercises before starting with the trees and shrubs.