Getting to Grips with Italian Onions

In response to constant nagging from several dear students!! I am endeavouring to blog regularly during our week in Preci.
So now all the students have started their projects I have begun working on an onion composition. Before travelling up into the Sibillini mountains we visited the Campo di Fiori in Rome to hunt down some suitable subjects for drawing and my little eye fell on these beautifully shiny bright red onions.
I was particularly taken by the lovely scrappy dried leaves.
I started by sketching out a small composition and then sized this up to life size. This I then refined several times before transferring on the light box onto Fabriano 5 Classico.
Then I started shading with a couple of dark Tombow pencils and then gradually built up the purples and reds.
The flaky bits of skin and the dried leaves I tackled using a base colour and then detailing with graphite.