Homework

Cape Primrose 7001 (Streptocarpus x hybrid '7001'), watercolor 10"h x 14"w

Recently, I've been bringing the pieces started as demos in my classes home to finish them, as experiments in techniques I can show my students. Obviously, I have to have a good grasp of the techniques before I can show and explain how to achieve the effect to them. So in essence, I've been giving myself homework.

I started this watercolor of my beautiful Streptocarpus hybrid  '7001' in class, and have been working on it to figure out how to render the color and texture of the leaves, as well as come up with an interesting composition. This demo started as a direct line drawing of the two flowers on the right, the two leaves to their left, and the arching leaf above to frame them. Once I had these down on the paper, it seemed to me that another pink accent was needed on the left, so I added another flower, two small leaves, then the two buds and the leaf curling to the left. I'm still working on it, to see how much more texture I can add to the leaves to make them look as real as possible. The leaves could all use a bit more color variation too.

Hyacinth bulbs, stage 1

Another one of my students was having trouble with a colored pencil drawing of some lovely reddish-purple hyacinth bulbs I'd brought to class. In order to show her how to develop her piece, I decided to draw one at home, trying to use similar techniques to what I'd learned at Elaine Searle's ASBA workshop at the Conference this year. The workshop was for watercolors, but I thought these techniques could be applied to colored pencil as well, and decided to test my theory here. I started by laying in some bright Teal blue in the shadows, and pink undertones with bits of Naples yellow, over a grisaille drawing done with a dark sepia pencil (stage 1).

Hyacinth bulbs, stage 2

After the first layer of bright colors, I began to put down the red-purple tones on the bulb on the right, bringing in more Naples yellow, while taking care to leave the white of the paper for the highlights (stage 2). Gradually, I laid in more and more color, varying the purple with magenta, burnt Sienna and dark ocher woven in with dark sepia, to develop the full range of values.

Hyacinth bulbs, stage 3

The challenge here was how to make the surface look papery, with its layers of peeling skin of different colors, while maintaining the integrity of the round forms. It's so easy to lose sight of  the main shapes when you are dealing with the color variations on a surface! The core shadows and highlights must be maintained in order for that shape to remain "readable." Breaking up the surface color to show tiny highlights on the edges of the layers of skin and the veins, I think conveys some of the shimmering quality of the skin. I could continue to work on this piece, to make it look even more convincing, but this is enough for now.