Diving into Pinecones

While thinking about sunflowers

During my bike ride yesterday, I stopped at a picnic bench by the creek and pulled out my sketchbook. It’s been a while since I’ve sat outside and drawn something from the natural world. Looking around for a suitable subject, it was hard to miss the sea of pinecones at my feet.

I picked up a few and plunked them on the picnic table. At first glance, I thought, ‘oh, easy - look at those repeating shapes and patterns… just draw the same thing over and over kind of joined together and sort of overlapping…’

Turns out, those pesky puppies are really hard to draw! The so-called ‘simple’ shapes were actually subtly curved and not as regular as one might first think. As it turns out, trying to draw a pinecone is quite tricky.

Not helpful was the distracting view…

As I was drawing, I remembered a lesson from a first-year university design class my dad taught back in the day. I sat in on the night class one evening and the assignment was to study a sunflower and draw it from every conceivable angle. Students were to look at angles, lines, patterns, details, negative space, curves, and colours in an effort to discover the essence of their particular sunflower. I applied this strategy to my pile of pinecones.

I’m not sure how long I was drawing - it was fully absorbing work, so much so I was only vaguely aware of people walking their dogs, kids riding bikes, and various groups meandering past, deep in conversation.

The intended end result in my father’s class was not to create a technically correct drawing of a sunflower. Instead, the final project was to be an abstraction that somehow reflected something discovered during the students’ exploration and study of their subject.

With that in mind, I turned the page and did this:

Handy, indeed, that I had tossed my dad’s small watercolour set into my backpack before I headed out on my ride.

One of the weirdest things that came of this exercise? The end result, obviously - I wouldn’t have got there without many attempts at drawing pinecones from various angles… But also, I was concentrating so hard on the pinecone that the hand holding it in one of the little sketches magically turned out better than 99.9% of any of the other hands I’ve attempted to draw…

This was a super reminder that inspiration can be found anywhere - even lying around on the ground. And… don’t leave home without some basic drawing tools because you just never know when you’ll have a few minutes to take a close look at something you’ve seen a million times before.