Words and Images
Tree Speed Study
When rendering a landscape, you don’t always have the luxury of time. Sometimes broad strokes are not only necessary, but actively improve the overall effectiveness of your work. Getting too “pretty” and focusing on individual details can cost the entire illustration quality when time is limited. Furthermore, the client may read too much into a…
Tree Texture Study
How do you draw a tree? You can start by thinking about the trunk. How does the tree hold itself up? Is it an erect, straight form, or a wide supportive base? Consider how the branches spread. Are leaves sparse, concentrated towards the end of the branches, or growing densely directly from the bark? What…
Rock and Shrubs Study
Some fundamental elements of a landscape are also often ignored. To the typical viewer, it may not be obvious how shrubs and rocks dictate their route through a park or a forest, but it is immediately apparent when these elements are absent. Their layers soften the sides of buildings, and store rainwater in urban environments.…
Omens VI
I woke like i had come out the dark and i saw five dead bees around my shoes. We had closed them in, and they had crawled — on terribly weak legs — upwards through the walls and into my room to die by my bed below a closed window.
Reconstruction
It has been over a year now and I still wait for my shattered driveway to reconstitute and lead visitors past the pond-rocks, to where woolflowers tower proudly, contained in a pot. Some have tread quietly to the side door, mounting soft mounds of moss to tap with a fingernail on the dusty yellow glass,…
Solstice Fire (WIP)
The last campfire was beside Lake Geneva, and the night was clear for it but I cannot recall if there were stars. I recall the tears and the dock, the tone and length of the argument, the distant conversation, a light suspended in the washing dark, a boat drifting, windows, the flat glow of a…
Water Green
A spot where dirtand cool water stir. Reeds spiral up,only to thin and grow old –bird-wings that flash gold,a whip to strike breeze aside. Water lies clean with eel grassunder the surfacestill as moss,if moss wereto boil when it rainedor cloud itselfwhen a fish flew by. Watching from afar,it is tempting to toss a sharp…
Perenniality
I keep the yard,barbed fence surrounds a black patch –dirt, carefully prepared. I hold my hand on the trowelwatch over the churned earthand keep,then a green shoot. Stars and circles of blue-gold flesh,colors scintillating on the petal, cerulean and gunmetal.In the pistil a light sprays,burns furious for a time,fades, gutters out to die.I keep the…
Pitch
Water-rind –wrinkled film, plastic-like. A sunfish flier surfaces sideways and stays,heaving atop the slick. The sun beats but no fincan crack a pondso dark the light comes back.
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