This lunchtime, with the sun threatening to break through the clouds, I wandered somewhat aimlessly around the streets near my office. In my mind's eye I was searching for that perfect flower, or leaf perhaps, which I could focus on exclusively in an attempt to capture its fine detail. Sadly there weren't all that many flowers around and it wasn't until I strolled through the grounds of St Paul's Cathedral that I found what I was looking for. All I had to do then was block out the hubbub around me and think about how this flower was put together:
What I've done here is remove the background to the flower, and increase the dynamic range of the photo, to really highlight its tonal range. It didn't look quite this dramatic in real life but this is more or less the effect I was going for. Of course with the irregular, nested shapes of all the petals I had to begin by sketching out their various twists and turns while being careful not to turn it into a contour picture; too many lines would be distracting.
The interesting thing, for me, is that I didn't feel the need to achieve perfection with the outlines as I figured that I could achieve this from tone alone. Then, however, after shading in a few of the darker petals I wimped out a bit and decided that the picture would be more striking with bold ink outlines for the petals and a softer graduation in pencil for the changes in shadow. Looking at the result I'm sure that this was the right choice as my shading isn't sufficiently subtle for this to have looked any better than a mess without the extra definition:
Beyond this the quality that I really like here is that my drawing is recognisably based on observation of the real flower - which means that it hasn't been polluted by however my brain thinks that 'a rose' should look. This is an important step as it's important to reinforce, and trust, my ability to simply observe without any interpretation. Still a work in progress of course but at least there is progress as this first month draws to a close.