Good First Attempt

For last night's daily drawing, I went over and worked on sketching some of my neighbor's lilies in bloom. The mosquitoes were out, so I finished up inside sketching a cloth rose that someone gave me. Since one of the things for the next painting club meeting is flowers, I figured I'd try some flower sketches as a way to practice seeing a flower as a bunch of shapes.

I'm not sure what to think, although this sketch is slowly growing on me (and yes, I did mean to include a groan-worthy play on words).

There are so many shapes and details that it mostly felt like an accomplishment to not get completely lost. Back in May, I remember doing just that in a sketch of an iris bloom where I was looking straight down at the flower. I got lost and had to abandon that sketch.  The right side of the flower is a little on the flat side and I'm not sure that I captured all of the detail in the center, but I still think this was a worthy first attempt of a complicated subject. It has some good shapes. Plus, this was a good opportunity to play with hatching. One thing I learned was that it really helped me make the dark crevices on the left side of the flower dark enough.

I will return to this as a test subject for sketching some time in the future!