Drawing miner's thrift

In botanical art class today, the teacher brought in real plants (recently dug up) of "miner's thrift", a wild lettuce-type plant. I did a preliminary drawing of a single leaf (right side of photo) and a larger study of the whole plant (left). The top picture is my ink sketches, a rock with interesting holes that I brought to class, and some small shells that the teacher provided.

Five more drawings

Two more new drawings I did today (another piece of ginger and some dried leaves with mini cones), plus the three "upside down" drawings I did last week at the nursery.

Flora Farm sketches

I have three more images to show you, but blogger insists on posting them upside down, even though they are right-side up on my computer. Oh well. I just drew the dried flower head, and the flower sketches were done in the Half Moon Bay nursery earlier this week.

Ginger and feathers

This week, we brought some ginger root to class to draw. Our teacher supplied the feathers, and taught us her "embossing" technique to make the very fine white lines. First, draw the lines with a very hard pencil (6H, as I recall), pressing down to make grooves in the soft paper. Then shade over the lines with a much softer pencil. Even though the lines were drawn with pencil, they appear white when the paper around them is shaded. Fun and easy!

botanical pencil drawings

This week in botanical art class, we drew "toyon", which is a common shrub with smooth green leaves and red berries. My first ink sketch was not very good, but I did a better job on the pencil drawing. We also got to spend some time in the Helen Crocker Russell Library of Horticulture in the San Francisco Botanical Garden. I did the other sketch, of some seed pods, in the fall botanical art class.