Turned Leaves

I promissed to show you some more results from my botanical drawing course. On Tuesday we did a practice with leaves. How to draw and paint twisted, folded and turned leaves. Most of the ladies in the course made a drawing/painting of a hosta or Persicaria leaf. I was the only one drawing this leaf. The woman who brought this leaf to the course told me it was a Helianthus leaf. But I have big doubts about that. But it doesn't matter very much. It's only a practice after all.

Greens are difficult and leaves can be so very, very hard to draw well. Actually I admire artists that paint a lot of foliage. To paint one or two beautiful leaves is great of course. But to paint a whole bunch of them and do them perfectly.... sigh..... I just don't have the patience to do that.

Anyway... Here's the drawing. Coloured pencil again. And I must say that I'm pretty pleased with it. The fade-away distant colours just happened. I didn't think too much about that.

I had some trouble with the pencils though. The tutor, Valerie Oxley, brought some pencils to the course. I could use them if I wanted to. A nice way to try out some other brands. I tried some greens from the Derwent Coloursoft series. I wish I hadn't. I picked a beautiful Dark Green colour. A super colour for the shadow parts in this leaf. But when I burnished some of it with my white pencil the green turned into a viridian/ cobalt blue greenish colour. Very bright. I tried to get it all out of the leaf, but as you can see... here and there I couldn't. Never mind. It was a good practice and now I'm very sure I don't like the Derwent coloursoft pencils.