The flower that means spring to me more than any other is the violet. They are a little challenging to draw since the green and violet colors are nearly the same value in greyscale though. I plunged in anyway just to get the chance to stare at my favorite spring flower for a while.
The photo is at the bottom of the post.
I always begin with a tracing of my photo, and then re-draw the tracing as I put in details. I’m not a purist when it comes to this part of the drawing. My thinking is that I found the scene, I took the photo, I’m doing the finished drawing, so how I get the line drawing on the paper isn’t important. And it saves a lot of time.
I’m using my brushed blended technique with Grafwood pencils on Arches Hotpress watercolor paper. This will create a smooth texture that will mimic the violet’s petals.
Drawing the violet’s values is particularly challenging because the violet color ‘glows’ on my ipad screen, the device that I’ve uploaded my photo to and I’m drawing from, making it a little hard to see. I could have converted the photo to greyscale, but felt the converted version lost some impact. I’m hoping to capture some of that impact by drawing from the color version. I’ve decided to draw the green parts of the left violet in a lighter key to make it stand apart from the blossom.
Even though I’m drawing this at a relatively large size (3.25”x6”), the details are still tiny. So I’m working with very sharp leads to make miniature and smoothly hatched details that will blend well with the brush blended hatching on the larger part of the petals.
After I added the dark shadows, I could see how badly I’d misjudged the values of the petals. I re-worked those values to make them darker.
I’m worried that the dark shadows will overwhelm the drawing, but they were in the photo and I’m not such a good editor that can remove them or even lighten them to a significant degree. I added some extra petal detail to the dark shadow in the middle of the violet though, and I’m drawing the cast shadows with a dull HB pencil to make them look different than the petal texture.
I’m building the form of the petals under the detail first. Then I’ll add the detail on top of the form. It takes a bit of practice to see ‘under’ detail, but it’s worth the effort because it creates a more three-dimensional looking object.
The detail on this second violet is very subtle and I think the large shadow that runs across it distracts from the drawing and the delicacy of this blossom. However, this reflects on my photography skill.
I needed to use a fill light to lighten or eliminate that cast shadow, but I was so caught up in how pretty the violets looked to notice how dark that shadow was. It’s tempting to shortchange the photography so I can rush ahead to the drawing. But photography needs as much attention as every other part of the process.
I added the bottom right cast shadow and experimented with how to draw the green part of this blossom. I ended up drawing it in a lighter key, just like the other violet. I also experimented with adding the barely-there vein detail in the body of the blossom with an H pencil and a very light touch.
The stems were so thin that there was very little information I could gather about them to draw them with! I used 2H, and H pencils to draw the stems and an HB to draw the shadows. I tried to keep them as realistic as possible, but I’m afraid they turned out a bit stylized because of the lack of detail available to me.
Grafwood pencils work particularly well for creating a smooth hatch without any brush blending needed because they are so true to grade. That’s how I created the detail in the top of this blossom.
This drawing has successful parts and not so successful parts. I think making the green parts of the flowers a lighter key worked to separate the values. However, if I had been a little less in awe of all that pretty purple when I took the reference photo, I could have done a better job with it, and that would have lead to a better drawing.
Keep drawing everyone,
Carol
