[Say it like you mean it!] Last weekend I took a few pictures while biking around the area. This picture of a tree next to a trail reminded me of Groot, the tree creature from the movie Guardians of the Galaxy. Long, narrow head with eyes and a mouth. But then I thought that I should draw that to make it a little more explicit the image that's in my head.

So I used Illustrator and took the picture and traced some of the key elements there (by hand). I used the pen tool, which gives nice lines but takes a long time. And that was just for the basics of the tree. I added a few leaves and then realized there's a lot of background left because it looked too plain on its own. So I used the brush tool, with the original picture underneath, and quickly drew things in a sort of freehand kind of way to suggest some of the textures of the elements in the background. At the end I added the text because it kind of needed it (it couldn't go without saying).

Originally I was thinking I'd have to color it for anything to be recognizable, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that I think it's pretty clear as is, so I left it as a "simple" line drawing. I'm pretty happy at how it came out, but again, a lot of it was just tracing. I did try using Live Trace from Illustrator and because of all the different shades of color, it was more or less an images completely filled with lines. images/Drawings/Sketches/groot.png