The wind is urging them to fall. I drew from nature directly. The technique is called pointillism. Except for a few curves drawn in the branches, I made the entire piece by marking one dot of ink at a time. I used perhaps six different pen nibs to obtain the fine gradations needed to portray textures, shadows, and varying degrees of translucency.
Pointillism is a painstaking process that, if achieved, delivers subtle, powerful results.
Also, I tried to stress the space being carved by the arch of the swinging bough. That is why I pushed the cluster of leaves towards the right-side edge of the board. This left untouched a large section of whiteness that could now generate, through balance and contrast, a sense of motion in space. In this piece I pursued the traditional definition of art at the heart of my early training. This training held that to pursue art, one must first master, and then transcend, established principles and techniques.