Califlora - polychromos pencil over watercolour

Still one of my favourite drawings, but I love the test sheet too. When I make commissions, I draw two identical outlines on the same acid-free paper. One sheet gets used to test everything & becomes like that damaged portrait in the Oscar Wilde book, while the other becomes the nice shiny final artwork. Once the finished piece has shipped, the test sheet is the part I get to keep. I return to these sheets again and again, to relearn ways to draw difficult subjects.

I live in the UK and probably won't ever meet the Californian wildlife in this drawing for real. So it was cool to get to research parasitic plants, fritillaries, etc from somewhere else in the world!