Botanical Drawings

My weekend to host the Renaissance Art Gallery. I invited my students to come in and get some extra drawing time.

I am working on my botanical drawings of my hosta plants. for the weekend I pick a leaf and a stem and brought it into the Renaissance Art Gallery to draw.

Each of my students can select whatever media they want to do this drawing in. While we mostly work in standard graphite pencil, it is good to mix things up a bit.

I was joined by a student, Barb. She has selected her subject for a botanical drawing, the Bald Cypress tree, like the ones she often sees at the coast in South Carolina. She had photos from her visit there, as has done research into the Bald Cypress. Saturday she did thumbmails and started working on a larger sketch of what she wants to draw. Both Barb and I decided to do our drawings in Colored Pencil.

I have samples of just about every brand of colored pencil made, as well as several "kits" of the better brands, so we have plenty to choose from.

We also talked about what to draw this on. We have used a variety of supports for colored pencils. Some more successful than others. Neither of us like bristal board, We did like pastel board. Very much. I have tried and like mat board. But most of my students have not yet tried to draw on it. A couple of weeks ago one of the other artists brought in a number of knock outs from mat cuttings. (these are the part of the mat that comes out of the whole made to display the artwork)

So we have some mat board in several colors to try and use.