Hasty Charoses (Recipe Illustration)

Today I finally finished this recipe illustration for our food blog, Seasoning for Every Palate The recipe is for charoses (fruit and nut paste used at Passover). Although my recipe is very quick to make (just dates, almonds and orange juice), this illustration took me quite a while to finish.  Today I started by making hand corrections: a second layer of purple conte crayon on the background, additional smoothing and blending of all the areas with conte crayon. Then I used Sharpie markers to re-draw the date-palm leaves.  I made many other small corrections by hand.  Then I transferred the image into the computer. After I used iPhoto to make some basic corrections (cropping, retouching), I opened the image in Painter and used digital pastel to make some fine corrections to some of the lines, and then used cut-and-paste to adjust the line of the largest circle.