Sketchbook fever

Just the decision to sketch every day has made me see things differently.
I've surprised myself by picking on flowers so far - probably because they're the prettiest things in my kitchen.

This flower looked intriguing with the unexpectedly strong coloured lines seen with the light coming through the fragile moist petals. 

I realised drawing them with a pencil wouldn't convey the strength and delicacy, so tried out some watercolour pencils (aquacolour).

Drawing the veins was very different from how I expected - the rules of the pattern had to somehow accommodate four-sided shapes between some of them - quite unlike animal veins. It made me wonder how on earth they develop like that.

And made me want to try drawing them in a different order, starting with the four-sided irregular shapes.

The stem has some tiny hairs on it that I never noticed when I took the photo, which are a light grey colour. I have a pale grey pencil but it didn't show up against the purples. I think I would probably need some kind of paint for them.

Yesterday I went out with a camera and took some photos of interesting lines, as suggested in the introduction to the course.

This is one wall of a school. I liked the way the camber of the glass bricks, and the row of books inside made lines within lines.

There is something vey satisfying about squares, and interesting that we are able to so accurately judge when they are distorted (eg in this picture the ones in the top right hand corner look distorted because I- and the camera - were at an angle to the building)

This is a woven carpet. I like the way the colours go in one direction and the lumps in another.

It has such a strong texture to it that even looking at a photo makes you feel like you would get a rough massage if you walked on it with bare feet.

This is the pattern of light on the wall of my hall, coming through the glass of the front door. There are no bars on the door, the pattern is made by refraction of the light through machine-made bobbly glass.