September 13, 2011

    My kitchen window sill has a double row of treasures lined up along it:  Tiny shells, a couple of feathers, small stones and dried seed pods. These three seed pods, to be exact. Clockwise from the left, they are an empty day lily pod, an unknown pod that's still closed and a beech nut pod with the two tricorn beech nuts still in the centre. 
    This is a really tiny drawing, done on half of a sheet of an 8.5" x 5.5" sketch pad. The plan is to do some of the other things on the window sill on the other half so I have six or seven "natural treasures" depicted on the same sheet. 
    I used number 4B lead in a mechanical pencil, and a black liquid ink pen to partially hit the outlines and dark spots here and there. The interesting thing was how much of the ink sank into the paper where there was already graphite; more than sank into the paper where it was unmarked. Perhaps the graphite didn't coat the paper quite as much as it roughed up the surface.