#PaintSeptember's Final Contribution

September has come to a close.  I only painted one more for the month - a water color painting from a photograph of a flower (I think it's a dahlia), growing in a neighbor's garden. The piece started out using water color pencils, but I was unhappy with the way it was progressing, so switched to actual water color paints about two thirds the way through.

That just made the piece saturated with water paint and didn't necessarily make me any happier about it lol. I was going to post some work in progress photos, but decided to just post the finished painting because it ended up changing so much from how it started.

There is a reason I usually work with acrylic or oil paint, because I tend to try for too much detail using the paint instead of allowing the water to help create the final image.  Perhaps I can learn how to chill about it - keeping the 'less is more' attitude for the next water color painting I attempt, or maybe staying with acrylics and oils is a better match for me and the style I'm most accustomed to.

There are a couple more hash tag groups starting this month - #thedailysketch and #DRAWtoberfest - both of which are a great way to keep moving forward producing new artwork, while also continuing to meet and support other artists which has been so inspirational and fun.

Regular color pencil drawings and water color pencil drawings/paintings would both fall into those hash tag categories, so this might be a good opportunity to keep practicing with them more - or maybe getting out the graphite pencil and keeping the artwork dry for awhile is a better idea.

Thank you to anyone who may read this :)

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! :)