Field Arts Workshop: Around the World in 80 Trees No. 1 (N. America)
Inspired by Jonathan Drori’s wonderful books Around the World in 80 Trees and Around the World Plants, we’re going to travel around the globe by region and sketch interesting, weird, iconic, or beautiful trees and tree-like plants.
Stop 1: North America!
What you’ll need: a multi-media sketchbook or an accordion style booklet (see below), pen and / or pencil for our base drawings, and then watercolor or colored pencil to quickly bring them to life.
TIP: I used a strip of heavy watercolor paper folded into four squares to create an “accordion” booklet to record my trees (8 total, 4 on each side).
Prepwork: have on hand a simple outline map of North America (from the Arctic to Panama) so you can sketch location points for each species.
Length: 2 hours
Downloads and Resources
Click to initiate download of a PDF of the workshop presentation (large file) * Please do not circulate this PDF; if you wish to share the workshop, please use the page link:
Locations of the 8 species for this workshop (these are not the ranges, but the site where the specimen we sketch is located).
Tip: Create an outline of North America in your journal so you can mark the site locations of our sketched species. Credit: TimVandevall.com
Books and References:
Treeline: The Last Forest and the Future of Life on Earth by Ben Rawlance
NYTimes article about Diana Beresford-Kroeger, a medical biochemist, botanist, organic chemist, poet, author, and developer of artificial blood. But her main focus for decades now has been to telegraph to the world, in prose that is scientifically exacting yet startlingly affecting, the wondrous capabilities of trees. She is featured in the Balsam Poplar chapter in Rawlance’s book.
Colors I use:
I favor a simple primary “triad” plus two extra colors: Manganese Blue (“cyan”), Quinacridone Rose (“magenta”), Aureolin Yellow (“yellow”), and Burnt Sienna and Indanthrone Blue, all Daniel Smith.