Mother's Day Flowers

For my mother's Day present from my family I got a whole day to myself, which I spent drawing.

A while back Katherine Tyrrell, author of http://www.makingamark.blogspot.com/ , asked if I wanted to use a reference photograph she made of some daffoldils, that she was also using, and compare our outcomes. Its fun to see how differently we approach the same subject, as we have very different styles, and use the same medium.

here's Katherine's version: http://makingamark.blogspot.com/2008/02/composition-range-of-perspectives.html

Mine obviously isn't finished yet. I am not used to such a detailed subject, so despite the alone time my family provided me, I only finished half of the 11" x 14" piece.

I'm using Faber Castell Polychromos and Caran D'Ache Luminance pencils on sand colored Pastelbord. The "polys" are less stable on the sanded supports than other pencils and smear easily, so I've combined them with my wax based Caran D'Ache Luminance pencils, which is helping them stay put on the board while also affording me an even wider range of colors. I would use just my Luminance pencils, but the sanded paper really eats the pencils and the Luminance pencils are not available in open stock yet so I don't want to get in a situation where I can't finish a drawing because I am out of a certain color.

I get so excited when I learn something new about my pencils and one happy thing I am finding when combining my polys and Luminance pencils is just how WHITE the Luminance white pencil is. I've sculpted my flowers primarily with the Polychromos and then used the Luminance pencils as the last layer, blending things and hitting the white parts of the flowers hard with the white Luminance pencil and it was just the trick to make them sing! Yay for Luminance white!

Liz & Patrick that's one for the documentary!