Still life in Rome Natural History Museum-Concetta

Out sketching with the sketchcrawl group, foreseeing the wet weather, we were safely snug inside the Museum. I always fall for the small rather than the large, so I ignored elks and elephant skeletons and went along with these two creatures.
No latin names alas, since they were out only to accompany a very interesting exhibition by Hitnes (street artist and, I assure you , a visionary miniaturist too...).
Oh I'm SO slow with the little ones...get something wrong and there's no way back!

later on the same day I delivered a short demo of life sketching of a very dead branchlet of ilex oak. 40 minutes in poor light, well it could have been worse!

oleander seed pods by Concetta

Somewhat metaphysical... the preliminary sketches and a few more thoughts can be found on my blog. Enjoy Fall  all of you who happen to be in our hemisphere!

playing around- Concetta Flore

I'm trying not to be too perfectionist so I decided do go ahead with the shadows, though realizing there were fair chances that the ancient paper I was using (Fabriano 1947) would be too brittle for their softness (I was playing with the composition, mostly) and for tones in general... So it was, I'll start again on better paper.

The lime trees here are giving away their lovely seeds and I'd always wanted to paint them.