Drawing blueberries

Coming up with the initial drawing was tricky.  it had to fit the layout of the product’s box, and the commissioner wanted lots of berries; far more than one would normally see in nature.  Every time I submitted a pencil rough an email would ping back – “more fruit!”

Anyway, we finally came up with something that worked.  The next step was to make the berries look really juicy and delicious.

The illustration was done on a decent heavyweight cartridge paper, in this case Daler Rowney Smooth Heavyweight (220 gsm/135lb).  This paper (like many others) shows up slightly grey on scans, which I correct for at a later stage.  This explains why there’s a slight cast to some of the images in this blog.

Pencil rough of the blueberries (later rotated)

Showing shine

A good way to show the ripeness of fruit is to emphasize the shine on its surface.  Of course, when drawing on the page, this means making sure there’s plenty of white paper left to act as shine.  You also need to make sure there’s a good contrast between the dark of the fruit and this highlight.

Once you establish your light source, it’s worth plotting in lights and darks with a pencil line.  I tend to put a circle around the area of highlight, a little larger than I want the final shiny area to be.

Next you have a choice.  You can build up the dark areas of fruit with thousands of tiny ink dots in a process called stippling.  This looks amazing, but takes forever.  Or, you can take a short cut.

Short cut to dark fruit

I colour in big areas of the fruit, where I know the deepest shadows lie.  My permanent ink pen is used for this (I currently favour Unipin but any thin-nibbed pen with waterproof and fade proof ink will be fine).  Use a pen with an 0-5 nib as I want to block in large areas. The larger nib is faster, and also provides more consistent cover.

I outline each blueberry, then block in the darks as solid crescents of black ink.  I try to keep the edges a little scruffy as this will make the next step less time consuming.

Blueberry sprig with darks of the fruits plotted in

Blending the darks and the highlights

The next step is to make a natural transition between the dark areas and the highlights.  This is where the endless act of stippling kicks in.  Making lots of tiny dots to represent a tonal value.  What you’re after is a smooth transition from the solid black to the white.  As you encroach into the white, be sure the dots are further apart.

Be careful.  Stippling is cruel.  If you stop concentrating you may end up with dots on top of each other, in an area where you’re looking to represent a light tonal value.  This can look clunky.  In fact, you can see where this has happened in the illustration below.  The central berry has a dark spot on the bottom edge of the highlight.  This immediately draws the eye, and the whole edifice of pretending to represent light and dark with ink spots threatens to crumble.

You can see why the rough edges of the black areas are important.  They give a rugged margin that you can naturally build on, as you reach into the high-lit region of each fruit.

You may also want to soften the external edge line of each blueberry.  Do this by adding tiny dots along the inside edge of the line.

Illustration in progress showing the pen nib and the fruit which have vs those which have not been stippled.

Balancing the illustration

Once you’ve given each blueberry this treatment, take a step back.  You may find they’re all too light.  In which case, work back into the fruit, darkening the stippled areas and shrinking the regions of highlight.  Berries which are tucked behind foliage of other fruits will appear a little darker.  To draw the eye, you’ll probably want your central blueberry to have the most light on it.

Blueberries with completed berries

Finishing up and applying the technique to other subjects

Once the fruit are done, you can move onto the leaves, which are a little trickier.  These need to give information about the way light falls on the veins.  A youtube video I recently posted, discussing how I drew the leaves and catkins of the Downy Birch in pen and ink might be of use here.

Completed illustration of the Blueberry sprig

You can illustrate anything in pen and ink using this same technique – cherries, beetles, cows…..  The image below is a detail of the back of a cow.  I took the photo in the middle of illustrating the animal, to show the process.   Solid black, stippled areas of darker tone (at the top).  These fade out to white where the highlights are.  You can also clearly see the pencil lines I mentioned earlier.  These show where the lighter areas of the subject are.

Detail of a cow showing the technique in practice

And below you can see the finished illustration, with that back detail in context.

Cow pen and ink illustration

Below is an illustration of another dark fruit, the cherry.  Again, it’s the same technique. When seen this close up, you can see what an easy technique it is to execute.  Colour in blocks.  Do heavy dots round the immediate edges.  Do lighter dots where you move into highlights.

Cherry detail

And then, when you zoom out, you can see how effective the technique can be.  Behold!  Shiny fruit!

Completed pen and ink illustration of cherries

To be honest, it’s a similar approach when it comes to showing shine on fruit when you use watercolour.  Block in the darks, then blend outwards into the untouched paper of the highlights.  For more on this, please check out my blogs on showing shine on Hawthorn and Rowan.

Good luck illustrating, and don’t worry if all the stippling leaves you feeling dotty.  It’s a common afflication!

The post Blueberry: step by step Pen and Ink illustration appeared first on Lizzie Harper.

Starting out

Begin with a decent pencil illustration of your subject.  No need for any shading or tonal detail, but an accurate line pencil drawing is required.

I use a Pentel P205 mechanical pencil for this, with an H or HB lead.  The paper I draw onto is Daler Rowney Heavyweight cartridge, which works well for pencil and for ink.  Pens are Unipin, and I have them with an 0.05, 0.1, 0.2. and 0.5mm width nibs.

Using the 0.1 or 0.2 nib pen, literally go over the pencil lines with ink.  Where the lines are less heavy (such as on the end of a leaf vein) break up the line into dots or smaller lines.  This allows the eye to accept that part of the image is “fading out”.

Pencil drawing of the Downy birch with pen poised for action

Pen lines: How much detail?

When you’re doing this, you don’t want to be thinking about lights and darks yet.  Just shape.  Sometimes, the nature of what you’re drawing will mean areas appear darker.  You can see this with the catkin below.  because there’s lots of detail, the catkin looks darker.

You can choose how much detail you add to any drawing.  Certainly at this stage, you don’t want to overcomplicate the picture.  The white areas of paper are important, you want to be sure you don’t swallow them up.  It’s quite a personal choice when it comes to the amount of detail you put into leaf veins, I tend to draw the lines til my eye sees them dissolve into the blade of the leaf.  At that point I fade the line out into white with little dots, increasingly small and increasingly far apart.

Drawing pen lines on top of the pencil lines

Adding shadow

Once you’ve done the lines, you want to add shadow.  you also want to break up the stark solidity of the line.  You can do this by stippling.  Stippling is using loads of tiny dots to represent shadow and tone.  In general, the larger the dots and closer together they are, the darker the shadow is.  Less pressure means each dot will be smaller.

You need to look really closely at your leaf to see where the shadows lie.  In general, the tradition in botanical illustration is to have a light source coming over your left shoulder. This informs the position of the shadows.  Of course, you can change this light source, but do be certain you’re consistent so that the shadows make sense.

Another thing to remember is that if a shadow is cast below a leaf vein (as below), then it’s likely that every vein on that side of the leaf will cast a similar shadow – below the vein.  Look at leaves, often if the shadow is cast below the lateral veins on one side of the midrib, the pattern will be flipped on the other side.

Stippling the shadow below the leaf veins

Softening the edges

The eye likes things to have edges, and our stark pen lines have provided this.  however, the eye also relishes a gentle transition from a dark line to a white area of paper.  Stippling from the edges inwards provides this.  More dots right up to the pen line, less and smaller dots as you move in and away from that edge.

Darkening the edge of the leaf

Shadows

As well as smaller shadows cast by the leaf veins, or the edge of a stem, you have larger and darker areas of shadow.  In the Downy birch, the second leaf on the bottom casts a dark shadow on the first one.  Shadows are always cast by something, so you need to keep an eye on the logic of the tonality in any illustration

How do you show this?

Well, start by blocking in the area of shadow.  Use a thicker ink pen for this, with an 0.5 nib.  Colour in the darkest part of the shadow, making it solid. Make sure you look closely at the subject to figure out the shape of this shadows.  You can see this shape below.

Leaves completed, working on dark shadow

Stems

For some reason best known to myself, instead of working into the dark shadows, I decided to sort out the leaf stem at this point.  It’s easy.  Using the same approach as before, soften the top edge of the stem with a line of small dots.  To suggest shadow on the underside of the stem, do two or three lines of dots on the bottom line of the stem.  You’ll also want to darken the areas around the nodes.

Stippling the stem

Softening the shadow

Now we need to make that dark shadow less stark.  Again, use lots of dots to ease out the crisp shadow edge a little.  You want the eye to register the area as dark shadow, but not to feel a jarring at how suddenly it ends, and moves onto the white of the paper.  Soften it with stippling.  This can take some doing as you are almost building a solid black on the very edge of the dark area.  As you may well have noticed by now, stippling takes AGES!

Working to soften the edges of the dark shadow

Downy birch catkins

I struggled a little with the catkins.  I understood the structure, and had figured out details of individual scales and flowers.  But representing this on the illustration was hard.  it was another of those challenges relating to scale.  Having large things (like a leaf or a tall plant) with tiny elements (such as teeny flowers or scales) on the same image is challenging.  the worst for this is Cow parsley and relatives.  Enormous plants, with miniscule individual white flowers, and intricately divided leaves.

Working into the shadow of these catkins was tough too.  I needed the right hand side of each cylinder to be in shade, to be darker.  but I didn’t want to lose the detail under a blanket of stippling.  The catkins also cast drop shadows on the leaf behind.  This meant the very edge of the catkin, on the right, had to be left white (or pale) so it showed up.

Working into the catkins

Rubbing out

Once the stippling is all done, it’s time to rub out the pencil lines.  I use a soft rubber, a Factis triangular, for this.  it can lift a tiny bit of the darkness of the ink, so use a light touch.  It can also leave the texture of the page feeling a little sticky.  But it does the job.

Looking at a completed illustration with the pencil removed always feels great.  It’s the last step it what is often a painfully long-winded process.

Rubbing out the pencil lines

Adding things you may have forgotten!

Just because you’ve finished, doesn’t mean you can’t return to the illustration and add things.  In this case, it was only the next day that I realised I’d not added the species specific tiny hairs to the stem of the Downy birch.

Not a problem.  Using my thinnest pen (0.05mm) I just popped them in along the length of the plant.

Adding hairs to the stem

Completed Downy birch illustration

And that’s the Downy birch leaves and catkins completed.  I also did some details of individual catkin scales, flowers, and fruits.

Then I handed over the illustration to the design team at Jonathan Cape, so they could prepare the illustration for inclusion in The Tree Line: The Last Forest and the Future of Life on Earth by Ben Rawlence.

Completed pen and ink illustration

I believe they’ll be adding borders round the different illustrations, and one of the mock-ups looks a little like the image below.

I can’t wait to get my hands on the book.  It sounds like a timely and fascinating topic.  Looking at the trees growing on the edge of the arctic circle and seeing how they have been affected by climate change.  For fifty years they tree line has been creeping closer to the north pole, and Ben looks at what this means both for this northern biome and for the planet, and ultimately for us as well.

Below is a real-time film of me completing this illustration, along with me explaining the process and nattering away.

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