Tobey Griem "Lonely Tree"

9X12 , Black pen, pencil, all on paper, 2021

My idea is simply a tree sitting out in the middle of the night with the moon rising to the top. There is also a snowstorm that is going on in the drawing. I got my original idea from a video showing how to draw a very detailed tree easily and I just wanted to try it out and it sprouted into this piece. It evolved by me adding the snow and moon to add other factors to it. There was no real inspiration from my own life but I do feel like I’ve seen this before somewhere.

First I used the pencil to draw everything out. I drew everything with this. I then decided I would just draw the snowflakes with a pen and not a pencil because it would be a pain to draw with a pencil and then pen to really make it pop out and so it wasn’t so dull.

Personally, my artwork doesn’t really mean anything to me personally but the meaning lies in the tree’s loneliness. I feel like I want my audience to think about the tree being all by itself and seeing how alone it is. The tree being out in the snowstorm alone could be seen as people who have to go through tough times by themselves.

I find what was most difficult for me was the snowflakes. Especially because it hurt my hand doing that many snowflakes in minute detail. Mostly just by splitting up the snowflakes up into different days and not working on it for a whole day made it easier in my eyes to get it done and move past it. I feel like I would rather use a different material like all of the different gradients she has and use the shading pencil.

I would find this closely to be realistic though that I didn’t try to make it seem like it was realistic. It makes it unique to me. I feel like because of the approach I used I feel like I personally did things out of order. I love that the tree has so many different levels to it. It has branches and then little branches on those. It even goes one step beyond to add even littler branches on those ones.