Botany and Graphite

September's Daily Art

If you didn’t catch it, my daily art this month is from these prompts (which are wrong, if you look closely!).

I structured my skill-building exercises to start at the beginning, with sketches in graphite (i.e. pencil) and working at rendering values to give a 3D effect to my work.

I’m also, since this month isn’t focused on production for a show, being more relaxed and making sketchbook works, smaller, sometimes multiple days on a page, and not setting aside as much time for my daily exercise. On art, that is. I haven’t figured out a way to exercise and make art at the same time.

I’m mostly focusing on plants from my own garden, or at the very least my own reference photos for these. Life drawing is the gold standard, and I was trying to keep that in mind while setting up the prompts.

This is a wild sunflower growing riotously in my garden, and the angle I’ve laid it here doesn’t show off the sepals which look like petals in the drawing. I had it in a little vase while drawing it.

Like this millet grass, which I brought in from where it has grown up under the birdfeeder, from a seed the birds dropped. I clipped it to my paintbrush holder to be able to draw it from seeds to roots.

The tree portrait was done from a reference photo I took during my grasslands roadtrip this summer, of a dead Hackberry somewhere in an Oklahoma field.

From graphite I switched over to pen and ink, which is my first love as an artist. I was sketching, not inking over sketches, if that makes sense.

When it came to the prickly pear I’d done the basic rendition. Then, I took a photo in case the next step messed it up. I was really afraid it would - I’m generally bad at doing the shading the way I planned to do it for this work.

I didn’t mess it up! I’m happy with how it turned out!

Next week will be colored pencil, a media I like but don’t love, and I hope to learn how to make them work for me. I also have watercolor pencils I’m really looking forward to trying out.