Italian Pines

This is one of my sketches from our recent trip to Italy. When we travel, I usually take along some postcard size watercolour paper and send home some small sketches of our travels. The poscard has its own journey and arrives home (sometimes after us) with interesting stamps and stickers.
The sketch was done with my new Inktense pencils, with some water wash to blend some of the colours.
In Italy I was fascinated by the way the pine trees were pruned of all their lower branches to create a canopy and sketched many of them as we were travelling before I got the arrangement of the way the branches grew just right. (The lowest branches reached the furthest.)