Colored Pencil Potted Succulents

I finished the colored pencil succulents project I shared last week. Even starting with a greyscale guide, it was a major challenge to match the colors, place the shadows, and get good blends. This was a great way for me to practice, and definitely something I'll be doing again. 

This is my original photograph. Obviously, there are quite a few differences between my coloring and the photograph. But, while it's easy to see what's wrong, I'm also making sure to look at what's right. And what's close. It's all about progress, not perfection. 

Another thing I've learned is that an exercise like this needs good light. I worked on this project exclusively at my desk in the craft room, which doesn't have great light most of the time. I was surprised to see that some of my attempts at color matching were way off, even though they didn't look that different at the time. I'm going to try better bulbs in my overhead light as a first step, but will probably have to invest in a better light source. Blick has a wide variety of artist lamps, as does Amazon (affiliate links), but I'm not sure what's going to work best for my space. I'm open to suggestions!