Digital sketches

After responding about journaling below, I thought I could show you some of what I mean by digital sketches/journal. I started with some hand-drawn sketches of dandelion leaves that I scanned and traced into Illustrator. Then I created a dandelion blossom directly in Illustrator. I copied the leaves and flipped them. Copied the blossom and flipped and distorted the shape and put it all together to make a very stylized symmetrical dandelion.

You see lines overlapping one another here because I am working with separate elements that I am overlaying one another. This is just the playing around stage. Nothing is final.

Here I have stretched and moved individual parts of the same construction as above for a more naturalistic plant—not so symmetrical.

Then, just for fun, I played with the idea of using the first version as a repeating pattern.

I may end up using one of these or not. This is just exercise to start thinking about how I might approach this.

I find using a computer graphics program like Illustrator a wonderfully freeing way of doing preliminery sketches and designs, since you can use the same elements over and over, making small and large changes as you progress. Does anyone else work this way?