Delicious huckleberry drawings

Another step I'm taking in order to increase blog productivity is to post as-yet-unpublished pieces of my artwork (and I use the term loosely). There certainly is enough of it -- in fact, my main blog at the time was packed so solid with "drawrings" that I had to start another blog called I Can Draw, Too! so as to give my writing some breathing space!
` I shall eventually come to transfering those posts over here along with the others -- in chronological order -- as well as continue this trend with yet more drawrings, and sometimes even "painterings" for my fans to enjoy. For this post, I have some tasty-looking close-up drawrings of huckleberry plants, and a story to go with them:

Mature pink and white flowers of the Evergreen Huckleberry (Vaccinium ovatum)

During my time in college, I made a point of taking a botany class so that I could look at any plant around me and have some understanding of what I was seeing. To a great extent, I did manage to achieve this goal, and there are many important things that I still remember, particularly about plant classification and anatomy.
` The unfortunate part is, this happened back when I lived in a 300-square-foot room with five other people -- my talented and rockin' boyfriend, Lou Ryan, along with four also-talented degenerates. (They purportedly wanted to help us rake in the dough with their impressive music and movie-making skills, although wound up preferring to take meth and heroin.)

I made a lot of drawrings for this class, although my roommates managed to destroy many of them before I could even show my teacher. This included a stack of tree identification flashcards that I painstakingly drew from real twigs of various species, using a magnifying glass, and which I found one day scattered outside the window in the rain.

` Great job, scumbags. And they did even worse than that:

` I discovered that someone had managed to pull my GPA down even farther than I had thought possible when I found my final project in the Dumpster, ripped into soaking wet pieces -- thus further jeopardizing my Financial Aid allotment.
` However, they had missed the grayscale sketches I had made as a reference for my final, so at least I had something to show the teacher:

Leaves and immature flowers of the evergreen huckleberry
with Western blueberry (top) for comparison.

While the flowers are left to turn into delicious berries for all the creatures to squabble over, the leaves are commonly used in floral arrangements.

Left and center: Pollinated flowers giving way to huckleberries.

Top right: flowers of Western blueberry.

As you can see over the plant's reproductive cycle, the ovary of each flower slowly turns red and bloats into these delicious and juicy black berries that OMG! nom, nom, nom...

Ripe huckleberries -- look tasty even in black and white!

Reportedly, the Capella Indians would travel 20 to 30 miles a year just to harvest these berries -- and they probably had a lot of competition from all the animals that eat them (from chipmunks to bears). In fact, the first time I ever noticed these plants was several years ago, when I was hiking in the Cascades on a trail that was plastered with blue bird droppings.
` As suggested by their name, Evergreen huckleberries are resistant to the cold, and are handy as a winter source of Vitamin C for us silly primates who can't synthesize our own.

As for my class, I barely passed in spite of living in a tiny and filthy apartment full of cretins driving me crazy and destroying my belongings.
` In any case, I would have probably uploaded these onto I Can Draw, Too! at the time if these drawrings had been based on my own photos.
` As I had used someone else's photos as a reference, I figured that this might make me look bad somehow -- in fact, I've avoided uploading masses of drawrings onto the internet for that very reason. Now, however, I realize the folly of my ways, so stay tuned for more!