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The first cold morning that leaves a skim of dew on the grass changes everything. Overnight, the lime tree at the end of the road turns from green to a pale, papery yellow, and by four o'clock the light has gone thin and amber. Autumn is generous to sketchers, but only for a few weeks, and it will not wait while you decide which tree to draw. A little planning, a small palette and a calm acceptance that the light will leave before you finish will get you further than any new brush.
The single most useful thing you can do on an autumn afternoon is nothing at all for two minutes. Stand still, look at where the light falls and ask one question: am I drawing the object, or am I drawing the light on the object? The two need different decisions.
In the UK, the practical window from late September to early November sits roughly between mid-morning and mid-afternoon. Before that, shadows are long and cool and the ground is still in shade; after it, the sun drops behind buildings and the colour dies quickly. On a clear day, sit with the sun slightly behind your shoulder so the lit sides of leaves face you. On a bright but overcast day, colours actually become easier to see: the glare goes, the saturated yellows and rusts read clearly, and you can work for longer without chasing shadows.
Before you open the sketchbook, decide where the lightest note is and leave that paper untouched. Backlit leaves should never be painted; they should be reserved. Then commit to your shadow direction early, because it will not hold for more than about forty minutes in October.
Autumn colour goes muddy when black and too much green creep in. Build your darks from blues and browns instead, and keep your greens on the warm side by adding a little ochre. A workable set of mixes:
Test each mix as a small swatch in the corner of the page, with the date beside it. Six weeks later, that swatch tells you more about the season than a photograph will.
Speed comes from editing, not from rushing the pencil. Begin with a thumbnail no bigger than a matchbox to fix the composition, then block the largest shadow shape in a single flat tone. Add mid-tones next, and leave the lights alone. If you are working in watercolour, one wet-in-wet wash over a whole mass of leaves will read better than twenty careful individual leaves.
When the light finally goes, stop drawing and start writing. Note the colours in words — ochre with a touch of crimson; grey-violet in the shadow — along with the time and the weather. You can finish the piece at home from those notes rather than from a vague memory of orange, which is how autumn sketches end up looking like everyone else's.
Paint the light that lands on the leaf, not the leaf itself.
Nobody sees every leaf on a tree, so drawing them one by one is a lie as well as a chore. Draw the mass first, as a single shape with a soft, uncertain edge. Then break that edge in two or three places with a few clear leaf shapes, and the eye will fill in the rest.
The gaps matter as much as the leaves. Look at the sky showing through the canopy and draw that shape; the negative spaces will describe the foliage more convincingly than any outline. Dry, curled leaves are a different exercise: use the side of a 4B pencil for the crinkle, keep the stem crisp, and let a couple of them fall off the edge of the page.
Falling leaves are a deadline, and the easiest way to meet it is to write things down. Keep one page in your sketchbook as a rough calendar: date, tree, time, weather, and two colour notes. After a fortnight you will know which trees turn first, which hold their colour longest and which are worth a proper session rather than a passing glance. Pick three spots you can reach on foot or by a short drive, and visit them on the same days each week.
If you are sketching alone in a quiet spot, tell someone where you are going and when you expect to be back. Take a warm layer, and gloves that let you hold a pencil.
A small kit keeps you moving: a sketchbook that opens flat, an HB and a 4B pencil, a six-colour watercolour box, a water brush, kitchen roll, and a paper envelope for collecting fallen leaves. Add a flat brush for washes and a soft eraser you rarely use.
Then work to a ten-minute habit. Two minutes looking — where is the light, where is the lightest note. Five minutes blocking the big shapes in two or three tones. Three minutes of written colour notes at the bottom of the page. That is enough to catch a tree on a lunch break, and doing it four times a week in October will teach you more about warm colour and fading light than a whole weekend in November, when the branches are bare and the good light has gone.
