September 14, 2011

    I added three more seed types. You can see the bottom of the beech pod at the top, so counter clockwise from the left but skipping the beech, there is a button bush seed ball broken in half (with two seeds loose), three sections of a broken open marsh hibiscus pod, and a bitter melon seed, drawn somewhat larger than it would be compared to the others. 
     Again, I used only the 4B for the graphite and used touches of black liquid ink pen. The combined seed drawing looks like this now: 

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.

May 10, 2011

    I have a wooden bowl with a variety of nuts and cones, so I sketched a couple of these... more as a design or array than as a still life in which I would have included shadows to "ground" them. 
    These include an acorn, a cedar of Lebanon "rose" cone, a sequoia cone, an unknown pod, a section of short needles and a horse chestnut.

March 6, 2011

    This is a magnolia seed pod and a twig of magnolia leaves, sketched with pencil.
       I will be catching up over the next few days; I still have a sketch pad with two sketches missing, and I have been doing without a working computer for two days... Hopefully I'll have my computer back sometime tomorrow or the next day.

Feb. 20th, 2011

    Here is one sweet gum seed pod (commonly called "monkey balls" because they hang by their "tails"), one cone of an unknown evergreen type and one "Miss Hickory" nut. Frankly, I added the nut just to place a third thing in the sketch... it was less interesting visually and I spent less effort on it so perhaps I should/could have left it out.