Dip Pen and Ink Wash - Tree Branches

I've introduced colour and gotten rid of the shading in the last one - this is one of the longest drawings I've done so far, but I think it was worth it! I could draw in the lines and the lower leaves (which I've added a little contrast to by colouring them blue-grey) but how was I to capture the texture of the bark so high up, let alone the far away leaves? (That sounded very whimsical...) I had an idea! When I was younger, I used to play a game where you drew a really abstract shape that crossed over itself lots of times, and then had to make something out of it. Well, this time I drew lots of tiny ones onto the paper, joined them up, and went over them with my dip pen. Then I'd work out where the light should shine through and leave the paper plain. I got out my felt tips and coloured in all the leaves. I covered the tree trunk in a grey ink wash so that it stood out more from the patches of sky and you could see it was in the shade, and made it darker in spots where the creases in the bark were deeper. It took days and days to do all the leaves, but it could have been worse - I could have tried to do them all with ink! This is where felt tips really come into their own! Again, it looks a lot better when you zoom - although the shadows on both of these drawings are a bit odd - the light from the window makes them look darker and shinier in places, but it's just the paper curling up a bit!

Dip Pen and Ink Wash - Tree Roots

It's been ages - I'm doing so much more sketchbook work nowadays (I might upload some of it later). But here's two drawings I've done of trees: they took me ages, but I'm really pleased with them! This first one is of a tree I saw walking in the woods - the roots are all coming out of the ground, as it's on a slope that a lot of people walk down. I thought that the way they dipped up and down out of the ground was really interesting, and I hope you can see that that's what's going on here! I thought I'd try a different kind of shading for this picture - lots of regular lines attempting to describe the forms. I was thinking of kinds of renaissance engraving techniques!
This picture has lots of interesting little details that you'll have to zoom to see, like the clumps of moss round the stump on the right, and the leaves floating in a little pool of water at the bottom of the trunk. By the way, I thought that because I was going for an 'engraving' look, the most I could do besides covering the ground in hatching was to colour it grey. I'm very happy with this picture myself.