Huge distractions with this wretched coronavirus, the biggest con-trick next to climate change. I had planned to get this Coloured Pencil drawing finished days ago, but so many disruptions.

AND….from here on….this blog will be VIRUS-FREE. No mention of it. There’s more than enough of it elsewhere.

This picture is worked on 235gsm Daler drawing paper, using Faber-Castell Coloured pencils. The outline of the plant was drawn first in pencil, then carefully shaded using pale yellow to begin with, for the stems and flower-bases. Cadmium yellow with lemon yellow was used for the petal borders and centres; while a mix of orange-red, purple, very dark blue and black made the dark colouring on them. Buds started off with pale yellow or green, followed by layering with magenta and then mauve to create a watercolour-like effect.

Alizarin crimson came in on some of the stem, layering with mauve and occasionally dark brown.

What you don’t see is the fact that this is the third version of the drawing. In the first, I added a watercolour background of primula leaves, which simply didn’t sit well with the pencil-work. The second version also added a coloured background—rejected for the same reason. Finally I decided to keep it simple, forget the leaves and just keep the background white.

Coloured pencil is rather translucent and at the moment I have found it hard to get really dark colours. A bit more reading up on technique is required. Overall, though, I am happy with the result.

I don’t have a lot of work in progress right now but hope to have something new and ready (or part-ready) for a couple of weeks’ time. Unfortunately WordPress doesn’t allow much upload space for videos and I don’t possess video accounts elsewhere (such as YouTube, Vimeo, etc)…I’ll see what extras I can think of.