Tightly Rendered Graphite Botanical Drawing

Since drawing class last quarter was all about trying out different techniques and materials, one of the assignments was to do a very tightly rendered graphite drawing of some sort of plant. It took a long time to build up the value in this drawing, because it had to be so tightly rendered that there wouldn't be any visible pencil strokes. The process is a little too slow and tedious for me, but I had never tried it before so I still learned a lot from it.

The first image is the structural line drawing and the second is the finished product.