I've decided that one of the things which I should do during this year of drawing is to mix things up a bit. So rather than just follow my instruction guides day after day I plan to use them on some days and switch to more real-life, observational work on other days. Hopefully this will keep things fresh for me and also allow me to make practical use some of the skills which I'm learning.
Today then I headed out into the garden to look for some interesting leaves or flowers. Ideally I would have liked a sycamore leaf as these are large and quite interesting but this was always going to be a stretch considering we don't have trees like this round here! So, instead, I found part of a rose bush and set it up so that it didn't move too much in the wind:
First I roughly sketched out the leaves and stem with a 2H pencil; just trying to block out the general shapes really and how all of the leaves worked together. Once I'd finished this, and developed a feeling for the design, I switched to a 2B pencil to lend a bit more definition and weight to the dominant lines:
Using pencil in this way was great as it allowed me to close in on the final picture but I always intended to switch to pen to bring it all into focus. With this extra fineness I added in some of the most important veins in the leaves and also roughened the edges of the leaves where necessary. In the end I'm very happy with the result as I get a real sense of the leaves sitting in 3D space and interacting with each other:
The next step is probably to move onto colour but if you look at the leaves they are very similar shades of green with only subtle differences in tone and lightness - which probably means that capturing this is beyond me for the time being!