My daughter started drawing trees at the coffee shop. I watched for a bit, then offered some advice — how to capture the texture of bark, the way branches fork and taper, how to draw leaves as clusters rather than evenly spaced. Drawing technique, not observation.
On the walk home, we both noticed it. Every tree on our route had become vivid. The peeling layers on a birch. The way one oak’s branches twisted while the next one’s grew straight up.
Our brains are efficient. They see a tree, file it as tree, and move on. But the moment you try to draw one, your attention filter opens wide. You have to actually look. And once it’s open, it stays open for a while.
Draw it, build it, write about it — the act of trying to reproduce something forces the attention filter open on everything around it.
