White Peony Series

Over the summer I sketched out eight large drawings of peony flowers. My plan for this series is to use colored pencils, Prismacolor, on heavyweight Strathmore Series 500 paper, which is my favorite surface to draw on, and possibly add some watercolor washes-or not. Colored pencil is the art material that I am most comfortable with. Most of my portfolio consists of colored pencil drawings of still life fruit and vegetable subjects and a couple of beach rocks. I like the fact that I am able to control the medium any way I want. Colored pencil drawing is such a labor intensive material to work with and the slow process allows for a lot of thought as to what I’m doing. The dark areas may have 60 or 70 layers of color overlapping each other in order to achieve a ‘colorful’ dark value, so, with all the time involved in that process it is actually hard to make a major mistake that can’t be adjusted with the next layer. Although I don’t erase the colored pencils, by layering new colors on top of an area I am not happy with usually does the trick.
The image shown here is the Peony drawing-a work in progress. I started adding color to the flower petals and later I will go back and complete the background when I am satisfied with the contrast between the flower and the negative space.