portrait of a man in graphite pencil

I just finished this portrait. It is a gift for the birthday of my teacher, it is a portrait of her husband.
Very difficult to take good pictures of such a drawing. The paper is really white, a bit blueish I think. I always have to alter the photos and I always am not satisfied about the result. Of course every screen of a computer, laptop and such is different and therefor pictures are darker or lighter than at my screens.
It seems that my screens are a bit light in comparison to the ones of others.
So I place 2 pictures, in different ways altered.
Of course I like the original the most but once I gave the portrait away I only have the photo to look at. That's why I want good photos of my work.
The top one is softer, the bottom one is clearer but a bit harsh and a bit too much contrast. I do not know which one I find the best in comparison to the original drawing.

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Tiny cyclaam drawing

I just finished a new drawing.A clyclamen. This is a tiny one.
The leaves and flowers are only 4 cm.
I have the plan on doing the assignments of the SBA online course on my own.
So here is the second one for the first assignment.

Pelarganium botanical drawing

After I have been busy for a while with taking macro photos I undertook a new adventure: teaching online botanical drawing for beginners.

Just finished writing the text and drew sketches and drawings for the online course.
The content of the online course is 47 pages with more than 80 pictures and 34 excercises.

It was a huge challenge.
The drawing of the Pelarganium is placed on the last page of the course.
As always: very difficult to take a scan of this drawing like this, but here it is.

Sonchus oleraceus close up photos

I love those fluffy balls full of seeds. Just ordinaire weed and we pull it out in our garden.
But the flowers are lovely and so are the seeds flying in the wind.

I took these photos with a macro lens 90mm and my Sony a300.
For the photo of the seedball I used an umbrella and flash.
With the umbrella I covered the flash to get soft light.

Tomorrow I receive some extension tubes. I want to take even more close up/macro photos.
A real challenge but I love to experiment.

watercolor flower

The last 2 years I concentrated on painting fine art with oilpaint.
But Spring is in the air and so it is time to paint some flowers with watercolor paint.
So difficult to photograph though.

a beautiful cock almost finished

It took many many hours to get this result.
On the first photo you see the underlayers of umber and white.
On the second photo I added color, also many layers building up depth.
Still not yet finished, the white feathers need another layer and tweaking. You still can see the underlayer of umber and white shining through. The rest of the animal is ready (I think) :-)