Repeat Patterns, Playing with Pen and Ink

Some of the trees around me are starting to change color and loosing some of their leaves. We have had a fairly dry summer and I expect the trees are stressed so dropping leaves early would help them conserve energy and water. Anyway, I picked up one of these yellowing leaves on one of my walks to the Library. I believe the leaf is from a Eastern Cottonwood tree. I recognized the shape as being one I remember from my childhood in Illinois. There was a tree I and my friends spent a summer climbing, as I recall we were playing ship at sea, and the tree stood in for not only the ship but one of the masts, anyway it had the same type of leaves so must have been a cottonwood. 

I used the leaf I picked up as the basis of the above pen and ink work, tracing around the leaf with a technical pen 5 times and then using various fills to create tone and texture. Done in one of my sketchbooks. 

I seem to be into repeat patterns this week, I suppose not a total surprise since I have been working on the Mandala and that requires repeated patterns. The problem is how to get variety within the repeats. For the work above I sort of wish I had varied the size of the leaf, but I only picked up the one so with what I had at hand (no scanner) I had to work with it alone. 

Last week I made a trip into Boston and stopped at one of the Dick Blick Stores, I was looking for more colored pencils but they didn't have the mfg. I was looking for in open stock so I purchased some different items instead, like replacement pen tips for 2 of my technical pens. The above is a doodle I created when I was making sure the new tips were working properly. Not sure what to call it, and you can see what you want in it. Oh, the tips are working fine and I am having fun playing with them. See the two drawings below.

More doodles with my new tips. These I scanned and pulled into Photoshop for some additional work/play yesterday. The resulting image is below.

Above is my Photoshop creation. It might work for wallpaper or fabric, though I think the background needs more work. Originally it was just plain blue, but I felt that was too boring so I added the green squiggles. Still a bit on the boring side so I may do some more playing around with it and add another darker color to the mix.

I have often thought it might be fun to design fabric, not that anyone would ever ask me to do so. Still it was sort of interesting to play around in Photoshop to see what I still remembered of how to create documents from scanned images.

Last image for today is an update on the Mandala. The final ring has some inking, I finished the pansies and added some toning to that rings background. Now I have to decide what the flowers will be for the final ring. I think it needs some punch/color so we will see.

As a final photograph today, some poppies I found growing just outside the fence in someone's garden. Aren't they a pretty red. They are much smaller then the orange perennials that bloom in spring, but still recognizable as poppies.

That is it for today. Per usual comments are welcome.