Second Color Pencil Drawing - Dahlia

To continue my practice drawing with color pencils I thought I'd tackle a Dahlia flower.  I took pics as I went along to show the progression.  This time I didn't draw it out first with lead pencil, but went directly to using a medium shade of purple to draw all the outlines and shapes, then defined the shadows more thoroughly with the same pencil.  (Sorry the purple is so faint, I tried to adjust the contrast in PS but that didn't help much)

Here yellow has been added to the heart of the flower and I layered over some of the original purple with a redder shade to add some depth to the shadows: 

Next a darker purple was layered over to give more definition to the shadows and the petals:

For the darkest shadows I began to add brown and began shaping the petals more with varying shades of pink and purple:

Continuing with the purple, more pink and white was added for the petals' highlights:

This is the completed drawing before cropping:

And this is the cropped copy slightly color adjusted in PS. The original drawing is quite purple, but most of  the photos and even the scan kept bringing out the blue.  It was hard for me to decide which one I liked best, so I tried to keep it as true in color to the original as possible:

I still find myself layering a lot and many of the drawings I see in this medium that I admire are not so heavy handed. I guess it might just be my pencil style, more like painting in a way, but I also think it is my inexperience that I need to do so much layering before getting the look I want.

This was another fun exercise to do and I'm already looking through my photos to find the next one.  Over the past couple of summers I've taken many photos of flowers growing in my garden, mostly macro shots and I have plenty of source pics to choose from.  It is good practice and flowers are fun to draw because they are so pretty - lol!

Thanks for visiting! :)

First Color Pencil Drawing & other 'News'

I pulled out my Prisma color pencils a couple of days ago and drew a rose from a photo I took in my garden.  It has been years since I've used color pencils to draw anything in a realistic style having really only experimented with drawing grapes that way in the past.  Even though it was fun and the grapes looked pretty good, I didn't continue to develop this medium's potential.

Now, after seeing so many (and I mean LOTS and LOTS!) of really amazing drawings by artists who do use them on the sites I've joined, I am inspired to try again.  My technique is underdeveloped (I don't really have one - lol!) and I made plenty of 'mistakes' as I went along, but here are a few snaps of the process until the completed drawing scanned.

First I drew the rose out lightly in pencil then began adding a mid pink tone to define the shapes and shadows:

I began adding layers of darker shades of pink and I think that was my first mistake in not choosing all of the colors carefully right from the start as I had to go over the darkest areas a lot before completion (I think people who are really good at this medium don't have to do that but I am not sure yet what is the best approach)

Then I added some leaves and a background to define the edges of the rose and see the perspective more clearly to begin more detailed shadowing and color blending:

This photo is after many more layers of varying shades of pink and purple on the rose.  I added a touch of brown to the leaves and stems to give them more definition and another layer of dark green to the background:

And here is the final drawing - I decided to use the same brown from the leaves to add another layer to darken the background further, added a little more green highlight to the leaves and to the rose I added many, many more layers from very light pink to white and dark pink to purple tones to create more definition and depth:

So there it is, my first color pencil drawing of a flower. It was a good exercise and I did learn from it how I might better proceed right off the top for the next one I attempt. I think I overdid it with the layering simply because I didn't have a clearer grasp of the overall shadows' color/tonal qualities of the art as a whole when I started so was correcting that as I went along much more than not.

In other news, my Zazzle store is up and running and can be found here: http://www.zazzle.com/onlinebydesign

I don't have a lot of designs uploaded to it yet but it sure is fun creating all the products, please visit if you are so inclined - also, if you have your own Zazzle store and 'favorite' mine, I will return the favor ;)

Red Bubble has been fairly active for me this past week, 'Boats In Sunlight' has been featured 3 times since I wrote here last and 'Two Tulips' received it's first (links to feature groups under artwork detail on Paintings page).  So far I have only been adding pics of my older artwork to this blog when it gets attention elsewhere, since my intent is to move forward from where I am now in my journey as an artist. 

As well as the cultivation of inspiration and motivation, another great thing I enjoy about blogging has been getting to know other blogging artists, some of whom I feel a wonderful like minded connection which is very rewarding and exciting!

Thanks for reading and visiting! :)