The last entries in my sketchbooks before leaving Italy were daffodils. A patch of them grew spontaneously near my neighbor's winter wood piles, and I cut a few before the springtime-walkers and restaurant-goes took them all.
The graphite sketch was an attempt to capture the weak spring light from my front room window as it passed through the petals, while the second is me playing around with color, materials and techniques. Oil pastel can build up and get muddy but scratching it off allows the pigment stain underneath to come through and create a sort of colorful cross-hatching.
