Budding Botanist? And a few sketches...

It has been waaaaay too long since I have done any botanical drawing. But just this morning, I took some time to grab my pencil and some paper to do a little sketching.

I can thank my older daughter, who is 5, for this for two reasons, 1) she loves to have us pick up a bunch of flowers at the store every so often so we bought a bouquet of spray roses over the weekend, and 2) they are starting to shrivel, so she asked to take apart some petals this morning before school.

I trimmed off a few flowers and buds and my little scientist (or budding botanist?) started peeling away the petals into a pile. The resulting stem, sepals, stamen and pistils were brought into the light of day and were begging to be sketched.

I love the curve of the sepals and the sharp point they come to at the tips. Although I am out of practice (my shading ended up a bit heavier than I intended...) it felt terrific to finally get back to it.

View from underneath the stems and sepals.

View from the side of the sepals, with some beautiful curling as well as a great view of the cluster of stamens and pistils at the center of the blossom.

 

The holidays and winter colds can really put a dent in any available creative time. Have you had any projects you have been away from and returned to recently? 

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Tulip Save the Date Postcard 

Rose Save the Date Postcard

African Daisy Save the Date Postcard

 

Rose - colored pencil study - finished!

I did some additional work on the main flower, the stems, and also the leaf. I think it's finally finished. It's been a fun project to get some practice with the colored pencils.

Rose - colored pencil study - almost done

The rose is coming right along. I spent a good bit of time this evening on the rest of the stems, and then working on the buds and the one leaf study that I included. I thought I might be done, but realized that I still need to work on the center of the rose itself. Still needs a bit of shaping/shading.

So, I'll leave it for now and hopefully do some final touching up to finish it.

Rose - colored pencil sketch - draft

So I have started working on the colored pencil of this rose drawing. It's interesting to study the shading and try to replicate that in color. I have a ways to go yet, but I like how parts of it are turning out. We'll see if that continues! Everything is a learning process... :)

One thing I do notice is that keeping the pencils very sharp and using a light touch helps keep everything blended together. I can then darken shadow areas as needed, without having too much heavy color already on the paper. This also allows for better blending of different colors. For example, on the darkest shadows of the rose itself, I'm using three different Faber-Castell Polychromos colors - light purple pink (started with this), middle purple pink, and dark red.

Rose - graphite

I'm working on a sketch of a rose - once again from a photo. Best to work from life, I realize, but in terms of practicing shading/colored pencil work the photos are useful tools for me (especially with toddler interruptions!)

The graphite rendering below is rough, but I want to use it as a starting point to refine the shading and eventually render in possibly pen/ink and colored pencil. The color of the rose is a beautiful, bright pink, with darker red buds, so I am testing out my pencils on the side to see what will work.

Negative space studies for botanical art

Welcome to my blog! I hope to use this site to show works in progress (botanical, wildlife, house portraits, pet portraits, whatever else comes to mind...) as well as other interesting sketches or projects that might not make it all the way through to a final piece. It's always fun for me to see artwork in different stages, including rough sketches and studies, so I thought I would share some of my own.

This particular post shows some of the negative space studies that I did in a beginning botanical art course. I love these because they really force you to see the space around your subject, rather than focusing on the subject itself. Very useful for helping one to learn how to 'see' differently.


The one on the left is a ground-cover rose bush, and the one on the right is a holly bush.