My wife and I were in Bangalore sometime ago and we spent a couple of days in the rural side, away from the hustle and bustle of the city. We walked past this dusty, red-dirty trail lined with coconut trees, with shrubs on one side, and I was caught by the shadows of the trees on the trail. There was also a certain symmetry about how the coconut trees were lined up along the trail, “fading” away into the horizon. I took a picture of this and used it as my reference image for the sketch.

Sketch: Coconut Trail

This sketch was one of my early attempts at really leveraging Procreate’s layers, to “build up” these layers from the dirt, to the low grass, to the trees overlapping each other, to the layers of shrubs, not to mention the shadows of the trees across the trail. I also sparingly played with Gaussian blur & layer opacity to make the trees further out, a little out of focus and “distant”.

As we were walking around this farm land, there were two, maybe three pairs of peacocks. We forgot how loud of a “miao” these birds have! Quite raucous, but also very very shy. We were barely able to see them with the binoculars and they would always “fly” away into the distance, as soon as they heard our footsteps or voice.

As you can see in the time-lapse below, I spent a fair bit of time having fun drawing the coconut tree leaves. It took almost an hour and a half before calling it “complete”. The other part I really enjoyed with the layers is having the dirt “show” through the grass on the ground. And adding a bit of darkness to the lower part of the shrubs (against the sun).

For a sketch this early in my Procreate days, I’m super happy with how this came out – 1h20m of time spent on the sketch, some 2,200 strokes, 4 or 5 different brushes (cloud, grass, technical pen, smudging), and 10+ layers.