Fall Tree Silhouette

One of the drawing tendencies I would love to break students from is making trees with blunt ended branches. I think it comes from thinking of them as a series of rectangles, when actually they are more like a bunch of very skinny and pointed triangles. 1. I had the students use a chisel tip black permanent marker on coated white paper (found some at local Kelly paper store) and start with drawing a trunk on the bottom half. They followed with adding five “fingers” that each touched the edge of the paper. The entire tree was filled in with black. 2. After reminding students that trees have a variety of thickness of branches, I had them add some randomly attached thinner ones. 3. To finish, all the closed shapes were filled in with different marker colors. I tried the unscented Mr. Sketch brand and was happy with the results.