Activity

Here is my exploration of the Nightshade Family. Almost finished. What makes a nightshade? Do you know?

I just flipped to the solanaceae page in my nature journal to remind myself of their key characteristics — they have five united sepals and five united petals, sometimes in the shape of a star (hence the “sol” in the genus name). They usually have five stamens, sometimes united and the stigma often has an enlarged, round tip.

This composition is amazing and so enjoyable to look at — how did you decide on the scale of the various elements? Some things seem bigger than life-size and other elements seem smaller.

So beautiful!

@maureenclareSometimes I enlarge a flower to show detail but otherwise all elements are lift size. When I enlarge I include a notation showing that it is enlarged

Here is a recent demo I did for a nature journaling class on drawing flowers.

This is an apple I did on copy paper using graphite pencil. I did this before doing the apple twice using watercolors and colored pencils.

2nd apple painting. Same apple, I used watercolors and colored pencils here also.

This is my first real attempt drawing an apple using watercolors and colored pencils

Oops… forgot to do the shadow… will go back later and do it.

Oops… forgot to do the shadow… will go back later and do it.

Great Ethel! This looks like a nice shiny crunchy apple! I really like how saturated you are getting. and your colors are great. I think you could get a little darker on the right side of the apple where the core shadow is, but you are already getting some nice 3D form. You could add a bit more toning on the inside of the cup shape that the stem…[Read more]

Nice graphite study, Ethel! And I love your note about it coming from your dad’s tree. It’s a nice drawing, and there are a few places that I’d take a look at. You want to try to get at least nine values to be able to give the illusion of three dimensional form. Think about the toning a sphere exercise. To may eye, this has about 4-5 values,…[Read more]

Lovely first attempt Ethel! Your colors are really nice, and I like that you marks are showing the contour of the form. This also needs more values. See if you can lift out some of those lighter values toward the left side, and middle, and then gradually get darker and darker as you tone toward the core shadow, which can be much darker than it is…[Read more]

Thank you, @Pam. I make the corrections.

I really love the added contrast to the middle and right leaves. Much better! I am a little confused about the light. You said it’s lit from the right, but the lighter colored leaf on the left makes it appear (to my eye) to be lit from the left. Is the leaf on the right just naturally a darker leaf?

Thank you Pam. You are correct, the lighting is from the left and yes the leaf on the right was much darker than the one on the left. I used a seed mix of different varieties of Swiss chard and the 3 here are different..

Hi, I’m Marie, Just signed up today! I drew these tomatoes to the best of my untrained ability after being inspired by the bits of info I have seen from this site and newsletter. Sorry if they don’t quite qualify yet… I can see that maybe I should learn the basics first before attempting a composition. But I thought it could be a good idea to se…[Read more]

Welcome Marie! You are off to a great start. Can’t wait to see you work through the lessons.

Also, I’m not going to critique this, because I want you to o your own critique later after going through the lessons. I think that will be fun!

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Would love to be there!