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

I produced this drawing mainly on-site in the Adelaide Park Lands. It was produced as part of an art project called "Microcosm", where I spent two years (2005 and 2006) working on pieces directly from one Moreton Bay Fig tree growing in the Adelaide Park Lands.

This drawing was produced as a way of somehow ‘completing’ a major drawing I had started and worked on from the same tree for some time during 1984 (a large portion of that drawing is shown directly below):

170 cm (w) x 156 cm (h), black biro on 15 separate sheets of brown paper.
Date produced: 1984-1986

I produced this drawing on-site in the Adelaide Park Lands using black biro on about a dozen sheets of brown paper (that butted up next to each other in an array of 4 sheets high by 3 sheets wide).

I wanted to keep the new drawing as large as I could using a single sheet of white paper, but this meant that this drawing size was less than half the size of the original major drawing attempted in 1984.

This new 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). Using biro was tricky, because I can't wipe out any 'dud' lines that I have drawn. I had to work very carefully, and make sure that I didn't leave nasty blobs of ink as I worked.

Large grids were carefully created (set out with the aid of a computer and then printed out) 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. All of the traced grid lines, were drawn freehand, to give an 'appropriate level of human touch' to all of the line work.

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 smaller than it really is.