Drawing Overlapping Fronds

I love playing with layers of pattern and variation. Here's one exercise that's fun and gives you head a bit of creative twist:

First, draw one half of the outline of a frond.

Add the adjacent set of leaves.

Turn the paper over and draw a second frond on the reverse.

Then add a medium filler either lightly in pen or pencil so the second leaf will show through on the paper when it is turned over again to the right side.

Begin to darken the first set of leaves.

The reverse frond will 'read' through after the first leaves are darkened.

Add the reverse leaves in a lighter value and darken the top fronds for contrast.

Now if I could only figure out how to do this with glaze......Using a grid guide might work, just as in enlarging a drawing. Would probably have to do this in underglaze for it to work with crisp lines.

Here's how the back winds up after the drawing is finished.

This idea would work with just about any complicated pattern you want to overlap.

I suppose you could do the same idea without flipping the page from front to back by drawing the frond outlines very lightly using two contrasting colored pencils.