What an amazing class! Thank you so much, Bärbel, for creating such a great and useful tutorial. In my personal opinion, acanthus leaf studies are absolute must for beginner illustrators and pattern designers like myself. 

As you can see, I took this class quite seriously and tried different approaches for basic shapes, shading and even colouring.

Speaking about ink work or any other material with achromatic finish, I think my favourite way of shading is the one with dots. I can clearly see couple of pattern designs that I could potentially make in this style. 

When I run out of pure black and white ideas, I decided to experiment a bit with some colour. Being completely honest here, in the beginning coloured pencil finish was the hardest one to complete... It just didn't want to look somehow acceptable and I started thinking that no one should see this fail :D Who knows why I kept working on it and surprisingly enough it turned out ok in the end. Not my favourite leaf though, but at least not as bad as I though it will be. 

Here I cheated a bit and made only one scroll, and it was pure fun to make it :) I've got the general idea of leaf shape variations and twists and couldn't wait to start working on class project illustration! I will definitely get back to the idea of watercolour acanthus based painting. Probably it's going to be larger format busy composition with some traditional elements, like stylised birds, fruits and flowers... 

And finally, here is my class project. I wanted to do something less formal, something more decorative rather than realistic and somehow made up this idea of stylised pineapple. In real life it looks quite interesting because of this mild bronze sheen of the paper I've used. For black outlines I took watercolour pan and white highlights are made with gouache (sharpies didn't work good enough on the glide metallic surface of the paper). 

The only downside of this illustration to me, is it's format. It feels like A4 size is not enough and I'd prefer to use A3 or bigger. Then I would have a chance to add some more complicated details to the composition to achieve more impressive feeling of the artwork . But, nevertheless, I'm glad that I took this class, it really helped me to open up my mind a bit and now I have this lovely piece in my collection!

 

Usually, when I upload my projects here on Skillshare, I try to give some details about materials I've used, but I feel like for this particular class that wouldn't be too much important or useful - obviously, everyone can use whatever they have in their drawer, but in case if someone is interested in my materials I decided to mention them too.

I've used:

- all liners and sharpies that I've got (Art-n-Fly Fine Line Drawing Pens, Uni Pin fine liners, Sharpie pens, ...)

- average quality coloured pencils - they are a bit too dry and it's quite hard to achieve intense colours with them (Faber-Castell)

- some watercolours and white gouache (Prima marketing, Watercolor Confections paint set, "Pastel dreams"; black colour from White Nights set)

- apart from pineapple illustration, everything else was made on the A3 Moleskine pad