I was experimenting with various stroke settings in Expression and came up with the two version of grass stalks, the one in outline and the one in green.

Hmmm I thought, that looks a bit like a page from my colour pencil sketchbook, so I decided to develop the image along that theme.

I started by creating a couple of graphite pencils, not based on any real pencils. But for the colour pencils, I copied some real ones from one of the jars on my drawing desk. The font is not quite right for the pencil being represented, but it is pretty close and is only really apparent when viewing a large version of the image next to the real thing.

Here is a close up of part of the image