The browse line is a distinctive line below which you don’t tend to see leaves or branches in places with ground animals, like deer, that enjoy eating leaves or branches.

Browse lines are basically caused by animals eating as high as they can reach. When everything below has been eaten, what's left behind can be a strikingly flat line of leaves at the base of the foliage.

Except for where there are giraffes or elephants where trees don’t stand much of a chance, even spiky ones.

This drawing is based on the beautiful Richmond Park in South West London which has a large number of old oaks and large herds of deer that leave a uniform underline to the canopy across the park.

The browse line

…by using the natural geometry of your joints. It took me a while to figure out that it’s easy to draw lines in some directions and hard in others. And most of the time it’s simply down to respecting the pivots of the elbow and the wrist. And also why we tend to angle our notebooks so much to the desk, and why, if you want to draw a smooth line at another angle, you’re really best-off just turning the paper.

As a corollary, I figured out that by looking at angle of most of Leonardo Da Vinci’s cross-hatching you can see that he was drawing left-handed.

Draw smooth lines

With primary colours - red, blue and yellow - secondary colours, made by mixing the primaries - orange, purple and green - and complementary colours - from the opposites on the colour wheel - red and green, blue and orange, yellow and purple.

It’s fair to say there’s a lot more to colour than this basic wheel. I will try to get back to it.

Get my new weekly sketch in your inbox

The basic colour wheel