@Ai I'm really loving your plants! I've actually been asked to do some trees for some band posters and freaking the fuck out because my forest drawing abilities are minimal. How did you go about articulating the leaves?
Thanks
My approach definitely depends on having pencil sharpened with a
long 'bullet' point, as this lets me put the gesture in in very light tones (side of pencil, with overhand grip) and sharpen it up later as needed with the point. You can see this in the leaves on the second pic: most of them have thick lines, a few are sharper.
This might not seem like it makes a big difference, but I find being able to switch between general and specific like this extremely helpful.
Beyond that:
* Whenever joint articulation is especially important, I remind myself to think of the
spaces in the object as being tangible (eg. a huge irregular balloon straining to expand against the solid forms of the plant). This helps make the members more firmly 'ranked'/'sorted' into clear locations in space.
* If you are using tones rather than just line, the planes at joints usually turn over one axis and then fade into another axis. Clearly tracking the turning of those planes helps a lot to give depth
* Leaves are
spatially-sorted series of front edges (the remainder is easy to fill in given a good front edge, or can just not be filled in as in the lower leaves in my second pic. In any case, leaving it till late in the piece is usually good). Reliably distilling what you see into a definite spatial ranking is pretty much down to practice.
If I look at what I've done here, I'd say what it most lacks is clear punch-outs (some level of crisp silhouetting -- not on the entire drawing, just on the most important parts so the viewer automatically extrapolates them to the vaguer parts). The tiny yet non-tangential spaces where different clusters of leaves overlap, are what sells the scale of the leaves; And fading out some of the higher 'see through' parts of the overall foliage conveys that the space inside the tree is.. well, a space (ie. some light from the sun penetrates). For a forest, I'd suggest each tree should have only a few such spaces shown, and using other cues like changing overall value to add depth without making the big picture messy.
If that isn't quite enough, you might also gain insight by investigating
L-Systems, which describe the regular pattern in which joints develop in plants and trees.
