Let yourself be open to what you feel the image might need next. I always get lots of ideas as I am working on an image ... it pays to become sensitive to your inner voice. Try not to be too harsh on yourself, especially when an idea is "budding." Ideas are very tender at that point and need lots of care and tending. This image kept generating ideas for me, as you can see.

Lets go back to the original drawing and give it a couple of different looks. This version of the drawing was done with a fine tipped black ink pen. It created a subtly different look. There are no lines fading into the background to give it depth and all the lines are exactly the same width too. This kind of drawing speaks of beauty of line ... of sharp clear line encircling interesting shapes.

To get a black crisp line, put another piece of tracing paper over your drawing and go over your lines with a fine tip black pen. This sounds easy but takes some practice to do well! It's awfully easy to let your pen slip near the end of a drawing and ruin it. This tends to happen when your hand gets tired so take a break if you are doing a complicated drawing. Another ink drawing tip is to end each section of the line you are drawing at an intersection of another line. For example, where a stem line intersects a leaf line. When you stop drawing and lift the pen or start a line you can create a little blob of ink and you can hide it better at an intersection.

You don't have to stick with back and white only. This Hollyhock had a beautiful shape and that is what inspired me to do a line drawing of it but it also had shocking red blooms and asked politely for a color version of itself. Here is a simple way to work some color into your art.

You can get this next look two ways. You can trace over your line drawing on another piece of tracing paper with sharp colored pencils or you can use an image editing program to colorize the lines. I used the pencil drawing with Photoshop to colorize these lines. It adds just a touch of color that is interesting and light looking.

Photoshop is expensive but PhotoDeluxe and Photoshop LE are much less so and both have the "colorize" option that allows you to change one color to another while preserving its value.