The scent of lavender

Sensitivity and empathy are qualities that are essential for drawing. You will certainly have noticed and practiced this in the past impulses. This time I invite you to look at a field of lavender as an inspiration.
A lavender field consists of many lavender bushes. We know these lavender fields from Provence in France. You’ll notice that the landscape is slightly hilly. Depending on your point of view, maybe you can see a patch of green in the background or a house that is all overgrown with green, which blends in with these lavender structures.

The idea of this exercise is to introduce a little geometry for a possible house into your drawing field. Around this drawing field you then develop the structure of your field that has a particular growth. Like here in the case of the lavender.

The first thing you do is to realize how big your lavender field can be on the drawing sheet. In our case, a house provides the geometry within the field. There may be slightly slanted lines where the house transitions into the roof. The roof itself consists of many fine lines that create the structure of the roof. Exactly the same, but much more subtle, is then the growing vegetation on the wall of the house. Study the contour of the house, how finely drawn, for example, the left side of the house is, where you can still glimpse a bit of the front.

Then you focus on the lines of these fields. The field consists of plenty of lavender bushes, which in their arrangement look like lines drawn in the landscape. By the motion of the lines, you can see how the landscape is moving, how the slight hills create its structure. The landscape is rarely completely flat. Rather there are hills or slight curvatures, even in a plane field. And these curvatures create a wonderful play of lines.

Concentrating on the line itself is very important. It’s necessary to look carefully at the lines in the picture of the lavender field. Maybe you take a photo, or you go to the Internet and search for a good image. Generally, we can differentiate between clear lines, hard lines, or soft lines – in this case they are soft lines. They are very soft in themselves and with lots of fine, delicate lines they are modulated even more softly. Consider the perspective, too.

As with a central perspective, the lines run from the left toward the center of the image and from the right also toward the center of the image. Then there’s an almost straight line, the almost continuous line to the right of the house. Additionally, the lines taper toward the back and widen toward the front. Notice where the lines are interrupted, where there’s a curvature. The line doesn’t always have to be excellent.

If you feel like it, you can take this photo yourself or take one from the Internet to draw it. Of course, you can take any other observation from nature. In any case, take a good look at the field of lavender. Look very closely, with a drawing eye, with an awareness of aesthetic reality. Through which you will then include what you see in nature in your drawing. This way you’ll be even more reduced, even more precise in observing the lines in relation to each other. How they oscillate and how they’re curved and how you can bring a softness to the drawing.

What the lavender field demands, and what is very difficult to depict in the drawing, is the scent. That’s our theme today, the scent of the lavender. The fact that it will be fragrant means that you need very soft lines. Very soft lines! On the one hand, the lines are softly drawn, softly modulated in themselves, on the other hand, they are also quite soft in the course of the line. They always move seemingly randomly across the drawing sheet; they’re not drawn mechanically. But with great awareness.

And the rectangle, which signifies the house, that is the geometry to these very soft lines. This geometry and vitality in the shapes on the one hand, the perspective, and the soft modulation of the lines on the other provide you with the basis for something that is otherwise not so easy to express. Namely, to create something fragrant. Something is fragrant in your drawing because the line is shimmering. A fragrant lavender field, that’s pure delight.

I hope you’ll be successful, and I wish you a lot of joy with this drawing!