73cm x 53cm, black biro and watercolour pencils on acid-free paper.
Date produced: August 2006

This drawing was produced as a way of somehow ‘completing’ the major drawing I had started and worked on for some time during 1984.

This drawing has been done directly from the tree as much as possible as it is now (on-site), but several branches had been cut off since the drawing done 20 years ago, so the original drawing was used as a reference for those branches.

I used biro and coloured pencils, to keep production time down to a minimum (still took several weeks), as opposed to the time required for a production based on pastels and conté (several months for the level of detail required). Note that because I drew this drawing using black biro, I couldn't make many mistakes because the black biro can't be corrected (can't be rubbed out or removed some other way).

I kept the drawing to a similar size to the other drawings in this project, which made this drawing size of the tree less than half the size of the original.

Grids were carefully created (set out with the aid of a computer) for the ground plane and sky space to provide expression of the wide-angle space, and to enhance the expression of the bough extending forward directly overhead. The coloured pencil work is designed to enhance the expression of form and space - a form of the exaggerated aerial perspective I like to use.

Including the artist’s drawing and hands was an idea that was going to be part of the original drawing. They are part of the wide-angle view. I feel that adding these helps to add some sense of size to the drawing, but the wide-angle view tends to make the tree feel much smaller than it really is.

I am very happy with the result.