I live in a nice light apartment, with a dark wooden floor from the 1920's and virgin white walls. After living here for a few years, I concluded that the walls can actually use some decoration. Now, I want to hang some of my own original pen drawings since they otherwise just sit in a folder on a shelf and, its also cheaper than the otherwise mandatory Ikea art.
So last week I picked up a couple of A4 frames and framed my drawings. For one frame I do not have a suitable drawing and because I want to have a 'balanced wall' (similar themed drawings) I decided to draw a second set of 4 mushrooms.
The first out of the four mushroom drawings will be the Morchella.
To draw the Morchella mushroom I used the following materials: regular A4 paper -the stuff you put in your printer, a HB pencil and 0.1 & 0.2 mm pen.
I begin by dividing the A4 paper in four equal parts, and go through a number of reference photo's and/or drawings. I always work with reference material to get the basic shapes and characteristics of the subject right. Google images is your friend here, or Bing if you must- no one is perfect. Afterwards I start -very roughly- to sketch the general outer shape and start filling in some of the details. The trouble with the Morchella is the honeycomb internal structure and as you can see I've mixed up quite a few lines in this stage.
When I'm satisfied with the general outline and the major details (which is never, but you must move on some point), I start going over my pencil lines with the pen. I don't spend time overthinking the correctness of the outer line. Doubt of which line to follow will most likely ruin my drawing. Next I start filling in the empty shape I created. It still doesn't look like much yet but I get a sense of what should be light and what should be dark:
I use a lot of dots as you can see. I continue drawing additional honeycomb like shapes to get a more balanced drawing:
Its very easy from now on, just keep placing dots on your paper. There is actually not much to it. Here you can see the result, next to the finished frame.
Do you notice each dot represents a pixel, and that from a 30 cm distance it looks like a coherent drawing? In the coming days I will take once in a while a pen to darken certain parts of the mushroom and by working on the transition spots from those dark/light.