Tropical Plant Studies

Last week I took a trip to Munich's botanical gardens for my illustration course exercise around the theme "Exotic", where I made some pencil sketches of some flowers and plants. This week I did some more work on a couple of the sketches.

For this one, I went over my pencil lines in pen for a bolder outline and provided more shading with the pen and using photographs I had taken as a reference for where the shadows fell.

For the second one, I did the same, going over the pencil lines in pen, but then I then I used gouache paint to add some colour and depth to the image. The nice thing about gouache is that you can use it in various strengths from very thick to get strong colours right through to a very watery wash, as I did with the background here.