Sepia House Plants

I have been drawing and painting for my entire life.  Mostly not real seriously but at times of stress I pick it back up again.  I did this back in 1990, after returning from the Mideast.  I had previously tried to jump back into painting after a six year gap.  I naively assumed I could start back at the level I had stopped at previously.  Well the painting was a failure.  In frustration I realized I needed to return to the fundamentals, i.e. drawing.  So I started to work through a series of practice drawing exercises.  One was to use the Sepia pencil and I drew the house plant.  I liked the shapes and spaces between the leaves.  Part of the learning to see is to observe the shapes but also to observe the negative spaces i.e. the spaces between the leaves.  You can compare this to some of the more recent drawings I have posted and you can see the benefit of practice and hard work as I can see the improvements. It is like music, to maintain you have do practice a lot just to maintain your skill level.