The final week of A Round of Words went well, as I once again reached my goal time for the week. I’m very happy with how I hit my goals this entire Round, in fact. I also feel okay about how this illustration is turning out. I almost believe it will be finished someday! That would be nice.

Here is a sample of one portion of the picture I’m currently working on. This shows just a few leaves. There are many dozens of these gradient-filled leaves. In fact the layer where I’m drawing them tells me it contains 822 objects as of this moment. The layer with the brush strokes for the pistils tells me it has 114 objects. There are many more to go.

The photo I’m working from isn’t visible here but much of my sketching has been done using a Turcom drawing tablet over a visible photo behind the working layer. (I lower the opacity of the photo so that I can see the lines as I draw them.) One thing I’ve learned is that when I’m sketching with the tablet I rarely get a smooth single line. My hands are not that steady and so the line will instead have several segments. And in places where the photo is dense, I often end up with a jumble of line segments (as you can see in this example, in the parts not yet finished and colored).

Much of my time is spent teasing out which segments belong together to form a full object (stem, leaf, or pistil), and which need to be culled or combined. It’s fiddly work, and slow, but I think the outcome is worth it.

Okay, there is no blog hop this week, but I am back to work. I’ll check in again next Monday.