I've come to realise, over the past month, that it's over-ambitious to expect to be able to complete a fully-fledged picture in every session. Once you start combining a number of different objects and adding tone (never mind colour) then expecting to go from start to finish in an hour or two is just going to lead to disappointment. So one of my new plans is to try working on the same picture over a number of days so that I can take the time to get the various shapes and positions right without having to rush along.
As a result I figured that I'd try this with the group of flowers shown below. By pure serendipity they happened to be lying on a table, where I was going to be waiting for a couple of hours, and lent themselves to a pleasing arrangement:
My first task then was to capture the irregular outline of the petals and the way in which they fitted together and overlapped with neighbouring blossoms. This entailed carefully studying the outline of each petal and trying to work out what this meant in terms of them lying at different angles. I quite enjoy this process but the outline drawing that you end up with appeals to the senses in a very different way than the actual flowers:
Still as the first stage in this drawing I'm content with the way in which the flowers have ended up. The problem that I can see is that the tonal changes in the flowers are so gradual I'm going to have a tough time translating them into shades of gray.