Plant-vegetation is such a huge topic, it is hard not to lose yourself in it.
So this week I decided to start from a point and separate the post from trees, bush, grass (which I have worked in the previous posts); moss, flowers (which are ‘coming soon’s).
Well, I want to talk about some terrific and interesting plants all around the world. They don’t always have flowers, fruits; are not leafy and green like corpse flower and rafflesia arnoldii both have irritating smell and both large plants; insect eaters like sundew (or drosera) and pitcher plant (looks like zucchini imo); lithop from ice plant family (“The name is derived from the Ancient Greek words ‘lithos’ meaning “stone,” and ‘ops’ meaning “face,” referring to the stone-like appearance of the plants.” from Wikipedia); helosis cayennensis -which is not a fungus-, welwitschia mirabilis from Africa etc…
One of my favorite plants connected with my childhood is mimosa pudica, also called touch-me-not, shy/sleepy/sensitive plant. In case of touch to defend itself from harm its leaflets close inward and re-open few minutes later. In where I grow up it is called ‘offended plant’.
And about drawing plants, I have a post for more common plants. There are some facts for plants I want to talk about; gravity, plant growth hormones and wind.
Gravity:
As a plant grows and bends -looks shorter (and thinner). Plan section of a thing is its real proportions and/or sizes (in a scale). As you bend or rotate the thing, at this point we talk about foreshortening.
That is a sketch I took a note on it. They grow upward and bend with the force of gravity some a little, some much more. See how the main vein in the middle goes in a curvy way.
See the ‘P’ points. On the left leaf with dots I showed the direction of the vein. On the other leaves above or on your own drawing you can imagine the way they follow.
In here I tried to show the variation of bending degrees of plants/leaves.
Plant hormones:
As you know plants face the sun (heliotropism); growth hormones makes the plant grow and they (I guess it is auxin) move to dark parts of the stem to escape from the sunlight; as they escape to the dark area and make there grow; this is how the flower heads to the sun and bends a little bit.
(A dialogue between me and my spouse:
S: In the past times when biologist found new kinds of animals and plants they used to draw them, so they had to draw well, you know?
Me: Hah do you remember that vampire movie, they couldn’t see themselves on the mirror so when they tried clothes they drew each other, heheh.
(What we do in the shadows))
An example: a sunflower grows towards the sun.
About the drawing: the frontal sunflowers are bigger, more detailed and you see their stems partly, though I didn’t draw it so clear.
I used felt tip pens (3 tones of yellow, 2 tones of brown, 2 tones of green, grey and black) and 0.05 fine tip black pen.
We go further (top) on the paper and in the landscape, sunflowers get smaller, drawn less detailed, colors fade.
For the closer part of the sunflowers I used 0.1 tip pen for crosshatching to indicate shadows. On the far parts I skipped to 0.05.
This is the done version above. And here comes a detail:
One more point is that the sunflowers face us; so the sun should be behind us.
Wind:
Another fact that you can use in your drawings. The whole plant and its leaves will be affected by that fact.
I generally forget watering them and I am not proud of that.
