This flower I thought would be very difficult to draw so I thought I'd use colour as my main source for the experiments on this page. The first one I did with pastel, I tested out some colours on the page first, trying some colours over others because I couldn't find one close enough to the colour of the flower. But then I found a different box of pastels and found a much better match. It was easier to get a good colour match for the experiments I did with paint just by mixing a few different ones together. I applied the paint using sponge of once, paper towels for another and tissue paper for the other. I like how none of the have perfectly straight edges as neither does the actual flower. I think they just work a lot better that way.

One of the first things I think of when I think of nature is leaves, so here is a page of experiments working from a picture I took of a leaf in the summer when working with depth of field on my camera. I wanted to do a piece in fineliner and see how it would run if I brushed water over it and so that's how I did the piece in the top right corner. Some of the parts didn't work too well like the fineliner didn't run completely and so left some marks. But overall I do like the outcome of this piece. I also really like the piece in the bottom left. I just painted a wavy line with a brush and then I used a sponge to create the leaves. I cut the sponge into the leaf shape myself and I think it turned out really well!

These are a couple more experiments I did. The top one was inspired by a piece of Christopher Wool's work that I stuck in the top right. The second experiment I did was inspired by Philip Taaffe, and I have added the photo on the right that inspired me. I tried to give the roses a bit of definition like Taaffe does by watering down the black paint and then one it had dried I went over it in a thinner black line so they looked like they had a bit of shadow,

This is my first page of experiments working from a photograph I took of a rose in the summer. I first did a pencil sketch and from that I could see where all the main sort of lines were for the rose which would help me when doing line drawings. The first line drawing I did with the red background was an experiment to see how it would turn out. The second one I did with a multicoloured background was inspired by Taaffe's work only the colours I used aren't so bright and take up more space than they would in his work. My favourite piece on this page is the string one in the bottom right hand corner. It sand up from the page so from this I could produce some more pieces like a print.

I did another artist sheet based on Christopher Wool as I found his work the most interesting. On here I decided to try and recreate one of his pieces that I liked the best. I had 2 attempts, the first in the top left corner, and the second in the bottom right corner. I thought the second image worked the best and looked more like Wool's original piece and so I've added a picture of that below. For both of these pieces I used only acrylic paint as I thought it would look better as the black and white would stand out more against each other than they would if I'd have used watercolours per say.

  

For my second artist I chose Philip Taaffe. I found him whilst looking through an artist book and his bright colours and repetitive patterns caught my eye. I used him for my nature project because in a couple of pieces of his work it looks like he uses simple flower patterns which I thought were quite interesting and I automatically started thinking about how I could adapt his style to my work. I used watercolours, tissue paper and coloured pencils to create the back ground for this sheet. I applied the watercolours with a sponge and I think I will be likely to use this method again for experiments on my own images as I think it worked nicely and gave a great texture.