Tag: pen and ink

Almost Back to the Blog

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Phew.. I have really put some hours in over the last week, barely surfacing to glance wistfully at the sun outside. I will post more about the illustration work later but now I have to get back to botanicals too, as the next course submission is almost overdue.
I am working in pen and ink this week, so today just a pen and ink sketch of a beautiful twisted dwarf poinciana, Poinciana pucherrima pod for a bit of practice.
And “thank yous”are also due to all who sent and are sending me emails re buying work and to Mary at the Orlando Sentinel for a super write up in the paper and on their website here

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Dwarf Poinciana Pod

Leaf of the Day: The Big Cauliflower

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It may have just been a cauliflower but what a beautiful big cauliflower it was, growing in the Vegetable Plot at Leu Gardens. It was enormous and would have fed a family of ten with a hearty cauliflower cheese. Mark Twain apparently said that the cauliflower was “cabbage with a college education”.
I had sketched it a couple of weeks ago, meaning to ask for a leaf to make a study of, but when I returned it was gone. Carpe diem I did not..will I never learn?


Sketches Leu Gardens

I really like cauliflower..But I have never tried to grow one. I love to see the pristine white florets tightly wrapped in their protective blue green leaves. What a very handsome vegetable they are. Bartolomeo Bimbi, favourite botanical painter to the Medici’s thought so too.


Monstrous Cauliflower and Horseradish, 1706 , oil on canvas

Bartolomeo Bimbi (1648-1729)
Bimbi, a Florentine artist with little formal training, painted still lifes of remarkable scientific accuracy. He specialized in “portraits from nature,” that is, the portrayal not of persons but of flowers, plants, and animals. His canvases decorated the walls of many aristocratic villas. These large-scale scenes of monstrous and odd specimens of flowers, vegetables, and fruits, which were grown in gardens amid fierce competition for the largest or most unusual hybrid, are complete with inscriptions listing the name of each specimen and when and where it was gathered. Notwithstanding this scientific approach, Bimbi’s subjects are arranged in picturesque compositions against landscape backgrounds, piled high on costly carpets and drapery, or placed among antique statuary. His patron, Cosimo III (1642-1723), was a gloomy and eccentric ruler, but he had a decided interest in botany, perhaps spurred by his rigid vegetarian diet, and the arts flourished under his reign. Also fond of exotic animals, he constructed a large menagerie in the Boboli garden behind Palazzo Pitti in Florence.

From the 2002 exhibition catalogue, “The Flowering of Florence : Botanical Art for the Medici”. National Gallery of Art, Washington here

It’s good to learn that the competitive veg growing spirit was alive and well, even in those days. They would, I imagine, have been envious of these.


from All Posters here.. I am not sure which State though…

The cauliflower was bred from one of the broccolis, one which was grown for its heads of flowers rather than its leaves. Gradually the “flowers” became bigger and whiter. Originally known as Cole Florie (cabbage flower) it was introduced into England at the same time as broccoli by the Italians and the French, and by the 1600s was widely available. It was also known as Cyprus Coleworts from where it also seems to have made its way to Britain.

Gerard mentioned it in his Herbal in 1597

“Cole flore, or after some Colieflore, hath many large leaves sleightly indented about the edges, of a whiteish greene colour, narrower and sharper pointed than Cabbage; in the middlest of which riseth up a great white head of hard floures closely thrust together, with a root full of stringes, in other parts like to the coleworts.”
From the completely fascinating “Glossary of Medieval and Renaissance Culinary Terms” here complied by thousandeggs.com .. go there to spend many happy hours browsing.

And for those who want to brush up on their maths, the growth pattern of the florets (curds) of a cauliflower, as with many other natural forms, illustrates the elegant Fibonacci numbers, and its fractal dimension is predicted at about 2.88… 🙂


Go here to the aptly named Dr Ron Knott’s excellent Fibonacci and Golden Section in Nature pages with lots of info and things to do ..

Today I made a couple of very unmathematical studies from my sketches and a photograph, but this beautiful cauliflower really deserves a much more careful painting but when I have more time.

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The Big Cauliflower

Watercolour on Kilimanjaro, size 8 “x 10”


Watercolour on Arches not, size 11.5″ x 8.5 “

Leaf of the Day: Dogwood

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Three lovely dogwoods, now in full bloom with dainty white flowers, greet you as you enter Leu Gardens. I missed the dogwoods last year, there was so much else to see, so I am determined to make some studies this year. It’s just so pretty and another white” flower” for my series. I did not realise that the white petals are not petals at all but bracts, the flowers are in fact tiny and yellow bunched together in the centre (similar to daisies).

There are some interesting possibilities about the origin of the name “Dogwood”. This is an excerpt from “Learn to Grow” Garden Guides here written by Dr. Gerald Klingaman

“The etymology of the word “dogwood,” used for our native C. florida, is not completely clear. One possibility is that it comes from the Middle English word “dag,” referring to a wooden spit made from a shrubby dogwood native to England. These spits were sold on the streets for cooking meat over an open flame.The word “dag” is itself an adaptation of “daggere,” or “dagger,” as we now know it. The Cornelian cherry was recognized for its hard, tough wood and was used for making pikes and maybe wooden daggers. Following this line of reasoning, dogwood is a corruption of the word “dag wood.”
The other explanation for the name is that leaves of the English Cornus were used to make a concoction to treat dog mange. A recipe is found in a 17th century herbal, so it’s possible that early English colonists saw the similarity between the plants and adapted the name.”

It seems that the Dog Rose’s name is also a misinterpretation from “Dag Rose” referring to the ferocious dagger like thorns.

Dogwood wood is very shockproof as well as very hard and at one time was useful for many small items such as chisel handles, golf club heads, rake teeth and machine bearings. When weaving was mechanised it was perfect for shuttles, which now had to withstand the high speed and constant wear of the big industrial looms.

From Philadelphia’s Workshop on the World site here H.Riehl & Son Textile Machinery, loom and shuttles.


Shuttles made of Dogwood and maple then impregnated with wax or clear shellac, these sold for $25-30 and were replaced “after having run round the clock for four years.”

I am going to the Gardens tomorrow and will find a flower to make a study of, and perhaps make a detailed drawing of the centre but for now a colour sketch from a pen and ink sketch I made the other day… so more dogwood tomorrow.
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Dogwood Sketches

Leaf of the Day: Stella Ross Craig’s Botanical Illustrations

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I had recently written of Mark Catesby and his magnificent twenty year production of the Natural History of Carolina in 1749 here and had thought how very few publications now would be able to sustain interest, or stamina, on behalf of either the public or the artist for something of that length. But a more recent and equally wonderful accomplishment was that of Stella Ross Craig, who must be one of my favourite black and white botanical illustrators.
I came across her work many years ago but only in the form of some old second hand paperbacks. Then, in a college library, I found the whole staggering collection of her Drawings of British Plants. The work, which is a systematic record of British Flora comprising over 1300 black and white plates, was started in 1942 and not completed until 1973. What made this different from Catesby’s work was that, rather than being aimed at wealthy patrons these drawings were issued as modest paperbacks priced initially at 6 shillings. In 1999 Stella Ross Craig became only the sixth person to receive the Kew Award medal and four years later was given her first ever exhibition at the Kew Gallery…at the age of 95.
She died in 2006 and the following is from the very nice obituary and appreciation in the Telegraph here

As she drew in black and white, colour was not an issue, so Stella Ross-Craig was able to draw from dried specimens in the Kew herbarium.
It was nonetheless a considerable feat of art and imagination to turn something dead, brown and flat into a vibrant image of a living plant. “They all come alive to me,” was her explanation. Perhaps the answer lay in the fact that she was a rarity among botanical illustrators in having been trained as an artist as well as a botanist. She completed the drawings at a rate of two a week, a remarkable feat considering their astonishing detail.
First she would read everything available about the plant and then, either from a live example or a dried specimen, she would work out the presentation and the magnified diagnostic details.
This would be followed by a detailed drawing in light pencil on white board, using a dissecting microscope and compass for the enlargements – vital for identification – and completed in ink with a lithographic pen. Finally, neat snippets of printed card would be glued in to provide the reference key to the likes of suffocated clover, spotted medick and hottentot fig. The medlar was her favourite of her drawings. “

This is her drawing of the Medlar.

These are some of my particular favourites:
The ubiquitous Dead Nettle

Cuckoo Pint or Lords and Ladies

And the lovely drawing of the Blackberry, well, one of the 13 plates titled “bramble” I had no idea there were so many different varieties of wild blackberry in the UK.
She writes in the introduction to the section,

” fourteen species of the subgenus Eubatus (the blackberries and dewberries) were all growing in Surrey where I could observe them throughout the year. First year stems and flowering shoots were taken and the bushes marked. Later in the year the fruits were collected from these marked bushes – a race with two legged predators lending a spice of excitement to the work! “


These days such modest looking drawings are easily overlooked, often only appreciated and used by botanists for identification. They are beautiful because of the sureness of the line, the clarity of the information provided and the arrangement on the page. The sheer skill in drawing in pen and ink to this quality and keeping that quality consistent over so many years is breathtaking. Should anyone doubt that, they should try to draw two parallel curving lines, freehand with a technical pen. There is much more “art” here than in many paintings I see in galleries today, it’s just quieter.
I am in total awe of this lovely work, her accomplishment and dedication.

Leaf of the Day: Crepe or Crape, Myrtles and Murder

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Probably the most interesting thing I have found out about the crape/crepe myrtle is the seemingly never ending controversy about its name. I had thought it was “crepe”rather than “crape”, because the name refers to the crinkled edges of the petals…in my mind like “crepe” paper, however …..see this and more of the discussion here at Garden Web here

” ‘Crape’ myrtle is the overwhelming choice both in botanical sources and in other dictionary sources,” said Michael Agnes, executive editor of Webster’s New World Dictionary.
The word expert explains that crape myrtle is a compound, two elements referring to one thing. “When that happens, a variant spelling is almost always associated with the compound,” Agnes said. But which vowel came first?
The first reference to crape, without the myrtle, came in 1685. Crepe first showed up in 1797, Agnes said.
“By the time someone decided to call this plant crape myrtle, crape was by far preferred,” he said. The first reference to crape myrtle showed up in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1850.

The trees are everywhere here, in every Mall, on every street corner and scattered around our apartments. While pretty enough in flower I thought the shape of the bare winter stems was more attractive, especially with their little seed pods which are still hanging on. The pale or mottled bark is also a welcome reminder of the seasons in amongst the lush but sometimes relentless green of Florida. I had intended writing about them before, as in November I had found some much bigger pods at Leu Gardens. Sadly they had mostly disintegrated but they belonged to the Lagerstroemia calyculata, which, according to the label is a relatively rare crape from Thailand.


The big and beautiful flowers of the Lagerstroemia calyculata, photo Nirmal Roberts from TrekNature here

But the controversy about the name of the crepes/crapes is as nothing when it comes to the pruning problems and “The Crape Myrtle Murder”, sounding more like an Agatha Christie mystery with Hercule Poirot at last running amok with secateurs, than a horticultural issue.

“Stop the Crape Murder”
Hideous crimes are being committed all ever Texas, some in our own front yards and many right in front of our local businesses. Unfortunately, many have turned a blind eye to the ongoing massacre. Not me! I can take it no more.”…
Such is the impassioned cry from Greg Grant’s article, more here

The terrible crime of “crape murder” occurs when the plant is ruthlessly chopped without regard to the natural branching habit It results in weakly attached new branches which cannot take the weight of flowers and reduces flower bud formation. Better it seems to underprune than overprune and never take its top off!
This is an example of an “underpruned” crape/crepe myrtle which does allows the tree to arch very gracefully.


from Houston Chronicle Gardening here

Go here to Wilson Brothers Nursery for this rather attractive printable diagram with instructions on the correct way to prune .. or is it?..it looks a bit severe to me!

This is the nearest crepe/crape myrtle to us. I took this photo today. It is a couple of yards away from the steps to the apartment and has been tidied up by the garden gang who come round periodically but, even after looking at the diagrams and reading the advice, I am still not sure if murder has been committed or not.

At Leu there are quite a few different ones including the Lagerstroemia calyculata whose pod I have drawn and another Lagerstroemia macrocarpa.
The drawings of the pods compare the size of the ordinary little street crape myrtles and the much bigger pod of the Lagerstroemia calyculata. I also made a quick sketch at Leu a couple of weeks ago because there are two crepe/crape myrtles which stand by a path nicely silhouetted against the dark green oaks. Some people I know think they are ugly in this state but I like to see their structure and tracery. Another reason not to be so quick to prune is for the sake of the birds who love the seeds..and for artists who like to draw them.

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Crepe/Crape Myrtle

Leaf of the day: Roots and Pandan Mats

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These are the root sketches from yesterday, the Snakewood again, the Screwpine Pandanus utilius, and some Strangler Fig roots.
Having done some quick research today on the Screwpine I see that the tree at Leu is just a small one with very modest stilt roots. It also seems that it will have spectacular “edible” fruit,
and its leaves are used for weaving beautiful mats and baskets in India and Indonesia.
One curious little tradition from North Maluku in Indonesia requires a woman to be able to weave screwpine leaves before getting married, as she will not only weave a marital outfit, but also give the groom 3 screwpine mats in acceptance of his proposal.

Here are some “pandan” mats from Farls blog “Photojourneys” here. His photos of the Phillipines are beautiful, it makes me want to get a plane ticket and go! He writes, The Philippines claims to produce the handsomest mats in Asia and arguably the most colorful and intricate fine-grained mats are handwoven by the Samal tribe of Tawi-Tawi.
These lovely mats are, at their most expensive about $20.

The following is an extract from from an article in “The Courier” Unesco’s online newsletter,(here) about one of the best traditional weavers in the Phillipines, Haja Amina Appi.

“Mat weaver Haja Amina Appi walks with a strong stride that betrays her 80 years. She is off to harvest leaves from the pandan trees that grow behind her home in Ungos Matata, in the province of Tawi Tawi, a small island in the southwestern tip of the Philippines.

The bulky leaves are thorny-edged, but she prefers this variety because it produces strong and sturdy matting strips. She has become accustomed to the prickly thorns after years of working with them to produce the raw materials of her art. Throughout her life she has been a mat weaver, teacher, artist, and most recently, a National Living Treasure or Gawad sa Manlilika ng Bayan Awardee. A mat can take up to two months to weave, even longer for more intricate designs.
Her work begins with the harvest of the pandan leaves. She then removes the thorns with a small knife and and strips them with a jangat deyum, a thin piece of wood with sharp tines. The resulting narrow ribbons are then sun-dried and colored in a boiling vat of anjibi, a commercial powdered dye.

To soften the strips and make them pliant enough for weaving, she crushes them repeatedly with a paggosa or heavy log, in a process called pagtabig. This arduous and repetitive chore is essential to properly dry the pandan strips without rendering them brittle and useless.


photos Renato S. Rastrollo

Haja Appi is famous for her even weaves and the creativity of her designs.
She does not work from a written pattern, nor does she use paper and pencil to keep track of each loop and fold. She relies on her innate sense of mathematical progression to calculate when and how the colored fibers will eventually join to create symmetrical geometric designs.What sets Haja Appi apart from her fellow mat weavers is the exceptional evenness of her weave and the startling creativity of her patterns. Although she uses a traditional repertoire of weaving techniques to create delicate, precise, and minutely detailed patterns, her simple geometric designs are dramatic bursts of color that both defy and celebrate tradition. “


I really love these traditional crafts which use natural materials and only hope that they can be sustained. Our society seems to be obsessed with needing to have more and more piles of cheap and tacky ‘things’. Surely one beautiful handwoven mat is worth 50 cheap mass produced synthetics? But the drive to show off the quantity of possessions, cheap or expensive, seems to be hardwired into many. Does it actually make people feel better? The sheer volume of really horrible decorations here, which spewed out of every gift shop before Christmas was staggering. Clogging up the shops one day, in the rubbish bins the next, but I suppose it keeps all the factories in China busy. (small rant, brought on by the news of the heartbreaking demise of first Royal Worcester and now Wedgwood, two of the great fine china factories in the world.. I just can’t believe it. It all makes me terribly sad.)

These sketches are done on a 8×10 inch sketch book with a black pen that will run a bit if you add water..which makes sketching easy and quick. All you need is sketchbook book, pen, brush and water…sometimes just sketchbook and pen will do, as spit (sorry) and fingertip will give you some smudging. Improvisation is the friend of the impoverished artist.
The pen is good for confidence in drawing because there is no prelim pencil work and no rubbing out, just straight in with the pen, you can’t fuss about with it. Worrying about incorrect lines is pointless and anyway if a root is a bit askew who’s to know. You can get way with an slightly misplaced root whereas an arm or leg wrongly positioned can be more serious.
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Root Sketches

Leaf of the Day: Bugs in the Paint #3 Garden Sketches

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Today has been a glorious day, with a chilly, misty start. You could smell the fog as it drifted across the lakes this morning and all the leafless Crepe Myrtle trees were wreathed in visible spider’s webs. A jetty on one lake I pass has a little lone Christmas tree which looked lovely silhouetted against the mist.

When I arrived at the gardens I went down to the lake overlook where great flocks of waterbirds were circling and skimming the surface, appearing and disappearing in the fog, all greys and blacks and whites.

The spiders webs were also uncomfortably visible here, hung about with mist and strung across the paths and between the trees, some huge, easily 3 feet across. I really prefer not to see them, and their not-so-little occupants. I sometimes feel I have been wrapped like a cocoon after a visit to the Cycad garden and I now adopt ‘the stick in front of face’ approach to prevent being completely disabled by spider’s webs. It’s doing nothing for my arachnophobia. Luckily the spiders are not as big as the recently recorded Huntsman Spider found in the Mekong delta with a massive 30 cm leg span. This, the bright pink cyanide producing dragon millipede and more here . If the spiders at Leu were that big I would be hugging the walls of the Mall instead of communing with plants and would have to switch to drawing home appliances. I wonder what the market for fridge and cooker drawings is like?

This week I had actually planned to work outside every day as my pledge to work plein air once a week has come unstuck somewhere. Yesterday was rather dreary but today I eventually did get out. So with a minimum of stuff, 3 sketchbooks..(two for watercolour so I can let one dry while I work on another and one for pen / pencil etc) one pencil, brown pen, one brush, little paintbox, water and new folding lightweight stool which will make life much easier, I spent 3 hours sketching and did a couple of watercolour studies.
I have to do this now as I really do want to draw/learn about/paint and record some bigger subjects. I sadly can’t bring everything back home to draw. Other than taking photos I have to go and draw these bigger things in situ especially the cactus for patently obvious reasons. So today was a start. The stool turned out to be a bit tricky as it is three legged and easy to fall off, but the gardens were mercifully quiet this morning. So here they are, a mixed bag of sketches.

From the Arid garden .. a cactus

and my favourite Gout plant, waving and saying hello ..

Elephants Ears from the Home Garden

Two views from the Pavilion which I drew back in April.. I love this tall lone pine tree. There is not much to it, but it is a great vantage point for the birds, and towers above the surrounding live oaks.

The White Garden


The path to the White Garden looking the other way from my April sketch.

There may be something here I can develop, but anyway it was a lovely way to spend the day in the eventual sunshine .. more tomorrow I hope, weather permitting ..

Leaf of the Day: A Daisy from Popsy and “Tiger” Rats

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Sunday is a day I now try to dedicate to my Darling Popsy blog, so today I have spent all day scanning in the old negatives of Africa and researching East Africa in the 1920´s in general. However in line with this blog, about all things natural, I will just quote a little from the letter I have published this time.
This is from Njoro, June 1926

“When we are ploughing the fields we often see Rats running away in terror, but these are Brown Rats and striped on their backs with Black stripes like a Tiger, they are rather pretty. You would like to see the beautiful moonlight at full moon all over the great Plain, one of the most beautiful things in Africa is the bright moonlight and the stars that twinkle twinkle, in the clear air.”

Reading these letters is making me think I should be illustrating them…(oh dear, yet another seed of an idea now planted…)

I was curious about the reference to the rats but a little research makes me think they are not, in fact, rats at all, but one of the African Striped mouse species. He would have seen them during the day, not only because the ploughing was disturbing them but because they are one of the few rodents which is active during the day and he is right about them being pretty!
Here is a lovely old engraving from 1885 of the Barbary Mouse, the African Striped Grass Mouse (S. G. Goodrich, The Animal Kingdom Illustrated 1885) from, coincidentally, the Florida Educational Resource here

and a photo of these endearing little mice from Edwina Beaumont’s excellent African photos here

The drawing today is not mine.. but, keeping it in the family and appropriate to today’s activities, this is a pen and ink drawing from Joyce Thackeray, daughter of Allan, the “Popsy” of the letters and my mum. Her musical and artistic talents were inherited from her father and a few fragmented bits here and there passed down to my sister and myself. Teaching “old fashioned” drawing skills to children is, I think, more difficult today. It’s hard to imagine a class of thirteen year olds now quietly making a careful pen and ink study of flower.
On 20th October 1931 at the age of 13 Joyce Thackeray (SEN/ 2A) received a mark of 44 out of 50. ( noted on the back) for her drawing…I doubt I am doing so well !
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Popsy’s Daisy

Leaf of the Day: Schefflera and the Genius Of Robert Hooke

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Today is Saturday, the weather is lovely and we walked to the main centre of Winter Park which is a street lined with cafes and shops and wine bars. It has a distinct European feel, you can still find independently run shops and down a small alley there is .. joy of joys… a delightful small secondhand bookshop run by Evelyn Walters Petit, Brandywine Books.

It is a shop that has a complete mixture of old and newish and Evelyn plays some cool jazz while you browse. But the excitement of a secondhand bookshop is that frisson of anticipation as you step in, an anticipation of finding something unusual, something you didn’t even know you wanted five minutes earlier and something you may never have known existed at all. It has to be a black day in my life that I fail to find something fascinating and desirable in a secondhand bookshop.

I also love the books with those scholarly pencil notes in the margin, with others’ names written on the flyleaf, newspaper clippings, cinema tickets and shopping lists. It’s hard to get those in Borders or Waterstones…so we did come back with a few, including Lisa Jardine’s biography of Robert Hooke.
Hooke was a brilliant irascible man, who argued with Newton, worked with Christoper Wren to rebuild London after the Great Fire, was an inventor, architect and engineer, kept himself going with laudanum and cannabis and amongst other things was the author of “Micrographia“, a startling illustrated volume of engravings published in 1665 based on Hooke’s own drawings of natural phenomena seen under a microscope. Here is one of them.

and another based on his drawings of fossils.

It will be an interesting read.

Caught up with all this literature, sun and my first swim in the pool here I haven’t had much time for drawing but after yesterday’s post I have been thinking about simplicity, shape and monochrome. Here is a big, (too big for the A4 scanner) simple pen and ink drawing of a handsome and shapely Schefflera leaf.
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Schefflera leaf.

Leaf of the Day: Bald Cypress Knees and Lizards at Kraft Gardens

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Eerily beautiful and tranquil, the huge primeval, moss draped, pines of Kraft Gardens dominate this narrow strip of land on the banks of Lake Maitland here in Winter Park. It’s a strange place situated in a very wealthy suburb where great mansions and estates, many built in the 1920s, jostle for prime waterfront locations and moorings, so it is one of the few places that the lake shore is accessible to us mere mortals. There is a strange austere exedra too, built by the shore, where you can sit and while away an hour or two with a book. It has the lovely inscription “Pause Friend And Let Beauty Refresh The Spirit” carved in fine Roman capitals .

Nobody much will bother you but remember you are not alone here. Far from it. Should you feel a prickling of the hairs on the back of your neck it is because you are being closely watched by the many many creatures who live or pass through this little haven. Squirrels, hundreds of lizards, anhingas, ducks, herons, egrets, woodpeckers and ospreys will have seen you and be monitoring your every move. Initially you see nothing but gradually you become aware of rustlings, chatterings and dartings and, sensing something approaching, look out of the corner of your eye to catch a glimpse of a white egret or two strolling amongst the trees or squirrels playing. Every footfall scatters lizards by the dozen.
Yesterday, because it is nesting season, the great trees were alive with building activity, affectionate chirpings, squabbles and flappings. There must have been 20 egrets, some flying backwards and forwards with huge twigs, 12 very noisy anhginas, and 2 great grey herons. An osprey glided in from the lake with a big fish in its talons and perched high on a pine tree eating its prey. On the lake a pair of gorgeous mandarin ducks, so handsome and glossy, pottered about in the reeds making plaintive cheeps. They very conveniently perched on a raised nest box for a while so I was able to sketch them.

So today I am posting some photos and sketches from Kraft Gardens. I was fascinated by the “knees “of the Bald Cypress (taxodium distichum) which grow along the water line, they are the most extraordinary shapes. The Bald Cypress is a characteristic tree of southern swamplands growing in stagnant pools, and forming wide buttressed trunks, together with these strange woody “knees” which project from the water. The knees are outgrowths from the tree’s roots and it seems that they provide extra aeration for the root system. Clinging onto the knees are the wandering roots and leaves of the adventurous syngonium podophyllum the Arrowhead vine.

My favourites are the sketch of the anhihga in the tree and the waterlily leaves, both have potential to be developed futher. They are done with a Pilot pen the V5 which is soluble so to add a bit of shadow just wet with a brush. It’s a very useful and quick sketching aid.
My sketch book is 6 x 8 inches.

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Bald Cypress Knees