red currants Dorothy dhunter Adams COLLECTION OF ARTIST

I continued with night school classes to further my pencil sketching techniques under Michele Binette who helped me in so many ways - in values, perspectives, vanishing point, eye level, shading techniques and all this helped my oil and watercolour painting.

We were instructed to look at books for a reference photo so I went through some nursery catalogues. A small coloured photo of red currants caught my eye and I wondered if I could capture the translucent quality of these succulent berries in graphite. It turned into a labour of love. Pencil slows down your thinking process making you live in the moment of each pencil stroke. Every little sphere had to be rendered for each berry, and each pencil stroke counting in its value.