Taking another quick half a day break from commissioned work a couple of weeks ago, I made this little picture of poppies. I found the blue and purple background I had put aside from a friend and decided to draw some poppies on it. More simple free hand drawing with no worry about precision or pleasing anyone but myself.
I had taken several pictures of poppies on a road trip through the Balkans last summer. These particular ones were from a pretty area right on the border of Bosnia and Croatia, looking out to the sea.
First, I picked out the poppies I liked most and drew them on the first scrap of tracing paper I could find. When I had all the flowers I liked, I transferred it to the blue background paper. I actually really like the scrap tracing paper and I might do something else with that in the future. I like the horizontal composition.
I traced these flowers onto the blue background paper and then filled them all in with white gesso. I wanted to use watercolor and colored pencil for these and if I colored straight onto the blue, the colors would have turned muddy. So I gave them a clean white base to start.
I decided to use my Cretacolor watercolor pencils to put down a base color of yellows and light oranges. After I sort of scribbled the color on, I washed over with a watercolor brush and clean water.
Detail of the scribbled color.
After washing it with water.
After the base color was added, I filled them in with more colored pencil, but not with the intention to turn it into a watercolor wash. I used a variety of oranges and reds to fill them in, and then used a fine black marker to hatch in some lines in the darkest areas. I used a white gel pen to add some more hatched lines for the highlights and then outlined the whole composition with the black marker to make it stand out more.
Details...
Details....
Finished picture, about 8 1/2"x11".
Thanks for looking!
In a previous post, I had done mixed media drawings on book pages I had printed and stamped on. After doing several of those, I thought it would be fun to do some artist trading card (ATC, 2.5"x3.5") sized art, so I cut up a few of the remaining book pages and glued them to watercolor paper for extra support. I did a couple flower ones (I really love drawing poppies, and since I have a colored pencil called "poppy red", that worked well!) and then a few random ones.
I really love the pink and blue ones (the one with the plumeria and the poppies), those were my favorite backgrounds. And I think the color of the flowers goes really nice with the backgrounds. I wish I had more of those to go around.
Colored pencil and extra fine sharpie marker on printed and stamped background.
Both of these are also colored pencil and black extra fine
sharpie marker on printed background. I love having a pencil called "poppy red"! When I did these, I actually had to do the pencil outline of the flower and then gesso the inside so I was coloring a white surface. The top one originally was just the pencil on top of the blue background, and the red and blue together made pretty muddy colors, so I gesso'd over them and colored them again. Much better color!
I love drawing octopus (octopi?). This is also colored pencil on printed book page. Outlined with extra fine sharpie and white gel pen. The white gel pen starts out bright, clean white but as it dries it kind of takes on the colors under it for some reason.
I don't know if you've noticed yet, but I love to paint my cat. He's such a regal animal and at first I thought painting a black cat was difficult, because I could never see much detail in the photos I took of him. But I just kind of go with it and have a lot of fun. In this photo, he was sitting under the table and there was a lot of light coming from the window behind him lighting up his left side and the other was much more in shadow and I couldn't even really tell where he ended and shadows began, haha.
Inspired by my trips to Italy, and Venice in particular. I absolutely love all the masks on display everywhere. I took a ton of photos of them when I was there. I would actually love to do a whole series of masks.
A few weeks ago, my friend and I did gel plate printing on some old book pages. She got the book from a thrift store and we had fun making the prints. We had some stamps, doilies and other stencils to play with. I now had several sheets of pages with some cool backgrounds on them, but wasn't sure when or what I was going to do with them.
Yesterday, I decided to draw some flowers on them. I used my own photos of flowers from my travels. For some reason, they were so simple to do and I did 4 drawings in only a few hours! I'm usually so slow. Maybe now I'm starting to get the hang of this mixed media stuff, too.
These are all done in colored pencil with a black extra fine sharpie marker outline.
I took the photos of poppies in Bosnia, the rose is from a garden right out front of our apartment in Scotland and the two plumeria are from photos I took in Hawaii. I see a lot of poppies throughout Europe and it made me realize that I don't think I've ever seen any poppies growing in the US. Weird. They're so pretty.
