Dogwood Flower Drawing

I chose this dogwood flower to draw because it has such a lovely sculptural shape, and its simple colors can be interpreted nicely in graphite.

In this post, I write about my drawing process to teach you what I know about drawing and to show my work. This is a little different from my usual way of doing things.

I hope to get better at balancing teaching and writing about my style of drawing as these posts progress.

Below is the photo I started with. I held an 18% gray card behind the flowers to get a good exposure. If you don’t know about 18% gray, it’s the value your camera longs for. In your camera’s world, 18% gray means life is good. If it doesn’t see enough 18% gray, it gets confused and makes things too light or too dark.

I don’t like to draw photographic backgrounds in my drawings anyway, so I accomplish three things when I hold a gray card behind my subjects.

1. I get a great exposure.
2. The background is already blocked out.
3. I make my camera happy.

The Composition
I’m currently working with Photoshop Elements 13, and some version of Photoshop has long been a part of my creation process.

I love the graceful way the dogwood flowers sit on the stem, so my original thought was to draw all three flowers with a shorter distance between them for a tighter composition. However, I found this single flower and stem arrangement that I liked better while playing with Photoshop’s composition tool.

Line Drawing Onto Art Paper – Or Tracing
To get the line drawing onto my art paper, I traced it. Yep. The truth is that tracing can only get you half way there. For example, look at the line drawing below. There’s a lot of drawing-by-eye left to be done.

On the other hand, I admit tracing saved me time, and for that I am grateful. After all, I’m 64, and I have a lot more time behind me than I have left before me. Now I’m going to have a shot of brandy while I review that last sentence.

Ok, All Better Now
I’m drawing this dogwood flower on Stonehenge paper. Stonehenge is a soft paper, so I transferred the line drawing very lightly via tracing paper.

(I now have a new LED Light Box Tracer that plugs into my computer. It’s so bright that I’ll be able to skip the tracing paper step and transfer directly from print to art paper. Yipee!)

The First Form Appears Like Magic
This is the most magical part of a drawing. Suddenly, three-dimensional form arises from the two-dimensional paper.

I hatched the deepest shadows around the bottoms of the stamens, brushed over them to fill out the mid-values, lifted out the highlights on their tops, and the forms took shape!

I always stop at this moment, lift my pencil, and lean back in my chair to appreciate it. But I’m easily entertained.

Mundane But Happy Hatching
I hatched some very light detail around the edges of the petals, darkened the leaves, and worked on drawing details in the stems. This was all done with my HB pencil.

However, the stamens took most of my time by far during this step. Each one had a ‘wrapping’ around its base, and there was an over-all curvature to the stamen structure, like the upper half of a ball, that put all of them at different heights.

The dogwood flower seemed to shoot out of the same point of the stem, with at least four leaves. That part of the photo was blurry in the gray scale print I was working from, so I enlarged the color photo in Photoshop and took a better look.

I could see a lot more detail in the color version on the computer screen, so I decided to draw from both that version and the print from that point on. I’ve always combined sources for my realistic drawings because I’ve never felt that the camera could capture what the eye could see, or what the rest of the body could sense. Neither can a print nor the computer screen, but combined they give me more choices to work with.

Petal, Leaf, And Stem
I worked on the petal details by lightly hatching them with a sharp H pencil and then smoothing the hatching with a brush.

I added dark detail to the stems by hatching with a sharp HB pencil.

Before The Background
The time at which you put in a background depends upon your temperament, and to a lesser degree upon your knowledge of how value works.

Take this drawing for example. If I put in the background too soon, it’d be too messy working around these large white petals. If I didn’t put it in soon enough, I might misjudge my stem values and draw them too darkly, because value is relative to a degree.

And Now, The Dark Background
I added the background using a sharp 6B pencil and a brush, in about three or four layers. I gently hatched-in small areas, brushed over them, and then repeated the process until I had an even tone over the entire background.

Stem Textures
Once the background was in, I could adjust the stems into their full values. Then I hatched-in the patterns I saw on each with H and HB pencils.

Each stem looked unique, but the texture pattern on each was made of hard and soft edges. When looked at abstractly, all textures are made of value and hard and soft edges, so don’t let ’em scare you. :)

Around The Petals
As always, I couldn’t leave things alone and wanted to reshape some of the petals after the background was done. Although the background was intensely black, it lifted well with the pinched tip of a kneaded eraser.

When I say ‘lifted,’ I literally mean that I pressed and lifted the kneaded eraser and did not drag it across the dark background. Dragging any eraser across this thick layer of slick graphite will only smear it. I prefer a slightly tacky kneaded eraser for ‘lifting’ graphite. General’s brand is the only tacky or sticky kneaded eraser I’ve found, but I haven’t tired them all. Let me know if you know of an even better one.

If I couldn’t lift the graphite entirely with the kneaded eraser, I used my small Tombow Mono Zero that I’d cut into an even smaller point to rub out the remaining traces. (With most of the graphite gone, it was alright to rub instead of lift.)

Petal Textures
In the body of this petal, I applied shadow hatching where the petal attaches to the body of the flower with an HB pencil. Then I moved the shading over the petal in a softly gradated way with a brush. (Yes, you can move shading this way. It just takes practice and a soft but firm brush.)

I created the mottled tip of this petal with the sharp tips of H and HB pencils. I brushed the area afterward to soften the edges of the hatching. Finally, I used a small pinched tip of a kneaded eraser to re-emphasize the lighter patches that were lost in the brushing.

I created the line detail in this petal with 2H and 4H pencils that were hatched and brushed alternately, and then I touched it up with a kneaded eraser.

Since I was working from more than one reference, I had to use my own judgement a lot to render this flower realistically.

As I mentioned, Stonehenge paper is soft, and I did dent the paper in some places when I transferred the drawing from tracing paper. I was able to camouflage most of the dents, and I hope the spray on matte fixative will help conceal the others.

Finished Dogwood Flower Drawing
I had the details of the top petal oddly out of sequence, and it didn’t matter, but I was compelled to fix them anyway. Perhaps I should talk to my psychiatrist about a med change. :)

With the petal detail sequencing taken care of, I only had to soften the shadows of the left petal and deepen the shadow details between the stamens.

Final Thoughts

I think Stonehenge paper was a good choice for this drawing, however I was clumsy in my handling of it. Next time I use it, I’ll remember to be extra gentle.

I’m happy with how this drawing turned out. The composition carries the eye well. Looking at the finished drawing gives me the peaceful feeling of being with the flower along the meadow’s edge, which is a good mood to create with a drawing. I hope others are able to feel it, too.

Draw courageously and with love,
Carol