Sketch of the Week: Easter Eggs

On Easter Sunday I set out on a walk with the intention of sketching some of the new iris coming up, but it quickly proved a little warm for my tastes. Rather than give up on sketching altogether, I grabbed a few Easter eggs I'd recently painted with an iris theme and drew those:

Drawing eggs is always a fun technical exercise because their simple elliptical shape offers great subtlety in surface modeling, but the painted flowers offered a new challenge. I really had to study the forms of the eggs themselves in order to determine where to add value or highlights. As with many of my drapery sketches, I left the scarf in black-and-white, as the paints I had on-hand really didn't capture the jewel-like tones of the scarf. If I were to ever turn this into a painting I'd use my better-quality pigments and use layers of glazes to recreate the original intense color.