Some Plant Sketches from the Arboretum

I'm taking Dynamic Sketching with Patrick Ballesteros at Concept Design Academy in Pasadena, and we went to the Arboretum this past weekend to sketch plants! I stayed for literally a whole day- exhausting but very relaxing as well.  I am learning so much from this class, and one of the things I really want to practice is linework, and really communicating the form and infrastructure of the plants efficiently through simple shading and concise lines.  Patrick makes it look so easy, but it's harder than it seems! 

The plant on the top right has lines that are way to dark.  I tried to make it look like the leaves are overlapping but it just looks like contour now because I kept messing up and tracing over.  That is a result of bad planning, which I learned is so important before putting down the real deal!

This is some older stuff where we had to put textures on objects and give it form through texture-- in some of them, I forgot about gradient from light to dark and small to large, which is really helpful in giving the illusion of bumps and curves on an object.