I was finishing my daily walk around Fitzroy and Treasury Gardens in Melbourne on a wonderful fine weather weekend (last weekend) . I had sat and sketched a lovely couple of ducks and was almost done when I heard some children yelling and playing. Curious I changed direction to see. There were a group of about eight children, girls, and boys between six and twelve (?) playing happily under a very large Pin Oak tree. The rest of their families were having a picnic nearby.
As I watched I saw they were all gathering up fallen leaves to make a big pile under one of the very low hanging branches.
They would then take turns to jump off the branch into the pile of leaves.
There was no fighting or squabbling and I wrote some of what they said on the page. I probably saw and heard them at their best, before they got tired !
It reminded me of some of the idyllic childhood fun I had with cousins and friends, Good times! It is so good to know that children can still enjoy the outdoors and simpler things in life. They were all called by their parents for break and afternoon tea. One children came back for a quiet moment at the tree eating hers. Then they all returned for complete destruction of the leaf pile !
I then added some colour to one of the line drawings.
I took a leaf home to draw. This one was from the tree, as the ones on the ground were all brown and dry.
What a nice minimalistic drawing of that huge tree! I love it. Was it an oak tree?
Thank you, Rika. It was the end of a few hours of being outside and sketching, I was tired and just wanted to capture the minimal. I am glad I stopped when I did as I could have gone on forever with the detail! It is a Pin Oak. I have discovered two website that help me find out the trees I have sketched. One is Melbourne based http://melbourneurbanforestvisual.com.au/#mapexplore and the other appears to be global OpenTrees.org is “the world’s largest database of municipal street and park trees, produced by harvesting open data from dozens of different sources. Between them I can figure out what I have been sketching,
I hate to be a killjoy, but the weight of the children, plus the subsequent movement in that limb would not have been beneficial to the tree. Sorry, but that drawing makes me sad.
Beautiful drawings. Good to see the children having fun with the leaves. What a pile they had and how lucky you were to be at that moment.