Gala apples

Another pattern, this time with watercolor. I painted yellow circles, gave them time to dry, then added a watery glaze of cool or warm red. After the glaze dried, I added stems with a Uniball Vision Elite pen, and shadows at their bases with neutral mixes left on the palette, adding a little purple.

As an afterthought, I sketched in part of our new wire fruit basket across the bottom, from memory.
Pentallic Nature Sketch.

Getting back in the groove

More gouache and pen

A further riff on Koosje Koene's gouache and pen exercise, this time inspired by a bag of Trader Joe's tangerines picked up yesterday.

Pigments:

M. Graham gouache, Gamboge and Pyrrol Red

Holbein yellow (contaminated with Holbein blue, which I found interesting)

Pen: Uniball Vision Fine
Paper: Cachet (Daler Rowney) 4x6 sketchbook, final page

Veronica Lawlor (Sketchbook Skool teacher), in a recent interview about the challenges of sketching in winter, mentions drawing patterns from observation. These are not from direct, specific observation, but were inspired by actual seeing, peeling, and tasting. I think of patterns as training wheels, to get back into the groove of sketching after the holidays.

Recommended reading: John Muir Laws, The Enemy of the Good: moving beyond perfectionism

Gouache and pen

This exercise is based on Koosje Koene's gouache and pen demo in her Draw Tip Tuesday video today. I didn't finish the pears off with internal patterns, as she did. I copied her mix of blue and yellow (but skipped white),  and left highlights. The dried out Holbein gouache I used was thin upon reactivation, and created interesting shading on the lightweight paper.
This page is the next-to-last left in my 4x6 Cachet sketchbook, used mostly for tv sketching, with dry media.

Pen: Uniball Vision Fine

(Greenery is Pantone's color of the year for 2017.)