Rose Hips

Another botanical sketch I forgot to post previously! Coloured pencils on Winsor & Newton sketchbook paper. This paper is not suitable for layering coloured pencil, so I really struggled, but managed eventually to achieve a reasonable range of tones and fairly rich colours.  The scan hasn't done it any favours though - the colours of the different types of hips look very similar here but they actually aren't.

Botanical Sketches

Some more coloured pencil sketches - I did these back ago in the autumn but didn't get round to posting them!  I was trying out different papers with these, trying to figure out which sketchbook paper is best for dry pencil and which works well with watercolour pencils (I used a wash of watercolour pencil as a base layer for the poppy seed heads).

Sycamore Seeds:

Dried Poppy Seed Heads:

Honesty Seed Heads:

Pussy Willow Stems

I wanted to see if I could capture the fuzzy quality of Pussy Willow buds in coloured pencil. I used the embossing technique before adding colour, to retain some bright white lines. I realised afterwards that it would have been much easier to use coloured paper to make the white buds stand out, but overall I'm fairly pleased with how it turned out.

Adonis Blue Butterfly in Coloured Pencil

My first large butterfly study in coloured pencil. I found the hairy body extremely difficult to capture accurately - with such tiny pencil strokes it's very hard to retain the highlights. I loved using all my blues though - they are the least used colours in my box! (Unfortunately the scanning process has made it look all shade of blue, but actually I used everything from Light Cobalt Turquoise to Indanthrene blue.