Sorry about the bad scans of these paintings. I want to take some decent pictures of these soon. Just have to stop procrastinating.

Plum Tree Sketches

So a friend of mine asked me to draw a plum tree in bloom for her tattoo. Of course, I have no idea what a plum tree looks like, so I do some web searches. What I find is mainly that plum trees have always looked better in drawings than in real life; artists throughout history seem to have this knack for idealizing the gnarled, diagonal composition of anything they draw. So I decided to go with the idealized version of the plum tree, since that seems to be what my friend would most like to have as a tattoo. I mean, I know I wouldn't want a photorealistic, boring ol' plum tree tattooed on my heinie. I'd want the windswept, romantic, contorted, gnarled, Japanese-style ornamental plum tree. That's what I tried to capture in these two drawings.