I drew this peony from a photo I took after a rain shower. I went outside barefooted and I can still remember how sweet the day smelled and how warm and wet the grass felt between my toes.
I lost the color version of the photo to a hard drive crash, which is probably for the best because this peony was neon pink. Its color is permanently burned into my retinas. I think that’s the reason why I’ve waited so long to draw this flower. I was intimidated by the memory of pink!
Photo Composition
Gathering my courage, I took the photo into Photoshop Elements and trimmed it down into this composition.
This is a pretty good photo, so some people might wonder why I want to draw it too, but it’s dark and broody and not moist and alive like that day felt to me. More importantly, photography is part of my creative process, not the outcome.
I’ve mentioned that I usually don’t like to add photographic backgrounds to my drawings, but I am going to use elements from the background in this drawing, so this is a good time to tell you that I don’t have any hard rules. I have a set of flexible ideas that I use to achieve my core goal of creating original work. My core goal never changes, everything else is optional.
Line Drawing Onto Art Paper
I decided to draw this on Arches Hotpress Watercolor Paper because Arches can hold dark values very well, and it can also support very gentle gradations. I’ll be using Grafwood pencils for the entire drawing.
I transferred the line drawing directly onto the Arches via the light box tracer which conveniently plugs into my computer. This drawing will be 4.75” square.
The Magic Begins!
The magic began when this peony’s petals lifted off the paper. I’d hatched in some shadow areas under the petals, bushed them out into the mid-tone areas with long strokes of my brush, pulled out a few highlights with my eraser, and suddenly I could almost touch the petals with my fingers! Moments like these always make me five years old again. At least my fingers weren’t sticky.
I used HB and H pencil hatching, followed by brushing, to shade the peony. I don’t use cross-hatching. My hatching always runs in the same direction, but it wobbles around and probably does cross over a bit. The point is, I’m not neurotic about it never crossing or anything like that, I just think it’s easier to blend with a brush if it generally runs in the same direction. I use a brush for blending that I made myself by trimming the bristles.
I also pulled out a few highlights with a kneaded eraser by literally ‘pulling’ or sliding it over the petals.
Reading Tea Leaves
The image you see to the left is a leaf from the line drawing stage, from this stage, and from the photo.
My Great Aunt Gertrude read tea leaves. I read leaves too, any kind at all. As you can see, laying down the first values in this leaf took some effort. I call this ‘reading the element.’
When I’m looking at an element very carefully to understand it, I’m looking at it the same way I would read a map, a blueprint, or a poem. A map has simple directions, a blueprint is more complicated and three-dimensional, and a poem is emotional. Anything after the line drawing is the blueprint stage. Voyages into the poetic stage can happen anytime the Muse feels in the mood.
Except for backgrounds, I always begin my values on the light side and darken them into their true value in two or three stages. Practically speaking, it’s a lot harder to lighten than it is to darken, and value is relative so I leave wiggle room for adjustment.
I used B, HB, and H pencils for the leaves and a 3B pencil for the dark background around the peony. Each of these areas was hatched and then brushed to create smooth textures afterward.
A Black Background
I decided I wanted the background to be as near total back as possible, and I was able to produce a very good dark value with the Grafwood No. 9B pencil. A close hatch ‘blooms’ when brushed and fills the paper surprisingly well. However, I’m not an expert at scanning or showing gray scale on a webpage, so I can’t really show you the true range of gray in my drawing. All I can say is, this is the darkest black I’ve ever created on paper with graphite before.
How To Create An Evenly Toned Background
To create an even background, I hatch small areas about one half inch square at a time. I make them with a sharp lead and use just enough pressure to cover the paper well, but not hard enough to dent the grain. The amount of pressure you can apply without affecting the grain depends on the paper you’re using. Arches paper has an internal sizing that makes it a sturdy paper, and that’s one of the reasons I like to use it.
I make all my hatches in the same general direction, I make two or three hatch areas next to each other, then blend them with a short stiff brush. I repeat this process over the same area until it is as dark as I want the background to be before I move on. I re-sharpen my pencil often so that I always have a tip that can cover the paper thoroughly and not skip over the grain like a dull pencil tip will. To give you an example of how often I sharpen my pencil, the dark background area around the peony in this small 4.75″ square drawing used about one-half of my 9B pencil.
Darkening By Brushing
Brushing over hatching darkens a value, and how much it darkens it depends on the softness of the pencil lead, how hard you push on the brush, the kind of brush you’re using, how much graphite is already in the brush, and how your Muse is feeling that day. In other words, always go about it carefully.
My muse and I seemed to be getting along well, and all other conditions seemed right, so I attempted a maneuver to add more shaping to the peony during this stage. I concentrated on the large overall shadows by hatching them slightly lighter than I wanted them to be, and then I brushed them into the darker value I intended while smoothing the hatching at the same time. It worked! Whew!
Hard And Soft Edges
I added detail to the surrounding leaves with H, HB, and B pencils. However, the angle of the light created many hard and soft edges that I needed to pay special attention to.
The lighting made the left edges of these leaves have a hard edge, but they lose that hardness as they angle to the right and downward. The water drop also loses its hard edge at the bottom.
This leaf is a maze of hard and soft edges that I won’t try to explain to you because life is too short. However, I will tell you that I used HB and H pencils, a brush, and a lot of swearing to draw it.
How To Soften An Edge
To soften an edge, use the same pencil you used to draw the element, not the background pencil. Or if you’re working within an element, like the leaf, use the harder or highlight pencil grade to soften the edge.
Patiently draw short perpendicular hatch lines along the edge (like this +++ ), very close together, and it will slowly gradate into the darker area beside it. You’re using the harder lead as a tool to move the darker hatching onto the lighter hatching, so start your lines in the dark area and end them in the light area, and keep them perpendicular, close together, and short.
If you want to make an edge disappear completely, switch to the pencil you used for the darker area and use the same technique.
Sometimes I touch up the edge hatching with a brush, sometimes I don’t. For example, I didn’t use a brush very much in the first example and used a brush a lot in the second. It depends on the paper you’re using, and a little on the pencil grade too. As always, this takes some practice to pull off well.
Leaves vs Peony
I see that I’m tending to draw the leaf details of this drawing lighter than in the photo, and I felt from the beginning that the photo was too dark. It’s good that I realize why I’m doing this now. Otherwise, I’d just get into a battle with my Muse. I hate those. She always wins.
As they are now though, the leaf elements are overwhelming the peony a bit. I’ll work to subdue them a little. Just – a – little.
Subdued Leaves
I darkened just a couple of the over-bright leaves, and that made them drop down into the picture plane under the peony better. Happily, all parties agree.
I darkened this leaf by going over it with sharp H and HB leads. I touched-up some of the line detail with an HB and B leads, and I used a brush to smooth out my hatching. I did lose some detail, but my intention was to subdue this leaf, so I was happy with the outcome.
I added darker shading with an HB around the outer edges of the peony, which pushed those parts farther down in the picture making the body of the flower look rounder.
I’ve over-darkened some of the shadows of the peony though. The peony was nearly vibrating with life that day, so I think I want to make it more vibrant than the photo recorded it.
There are a few drops of water on this flower that I’ve been ignoring. The very light shading on the petals will be easy to completely erase and I’ll add the drops after the flower is drawn.
Peony Vibrancy Lost
I’ve been working from a print and I think that’s why my peony has lost some of its vibrancy.
I’m going to switch to drawing from the computer screen. I know it’s possible to capture some of the onscreen glowing radiance because I’ve inadvertently done something similar.
There used to be a contraption you could buy for drawing or painting from slides. You were supposed to attach it to your easel so that you could view a sunlit slide through one eye while you viewed your drawing paper through the other. (Only they didn’t tell you that you had to use your eyes separately before you bought it.)
I bought one because there’s a sucker born every minute, and I’m one of them. I drew our cat with it. The drawing does practically ‘glow,’ although most of that is lost when you put in on webpage where everything glows.
Unfortunately, I was only able to use this device once because it was painful to use my eyes that way, but they did eventually learn to focus in tandem again. Digital cameras came along soon after that, and I took a class in Photoshop, thank goodness.
Reclaiming Radiance
I re-worked the peony’s values using the image on the computer screen, although I also lightened it a bit with an ‘adjustment layer’ to make the light values pop just a little more.
Even though the image on the right might look darker to you at first, its darkest shadows are lighter than those on the peony to the left.
It’s true that the left side peony has lighter highlights, but the right side peony wins for overall lightness. The left side looks pinched and sinks down, the right side peony looks inflated and floats up,.
The back edge of the peony looked a little soft and faded into the background in the photo, so I softened it and then immediately regretted what I’d done! (The top image to the left.)
My eye wanted all the edges to be crisp. If I were drawing this flower from life, I’d focus on each edge of the flower and draw each one sharply. I think this flower is so large that the back just dropped out of the camera’s depth-of-field focus.
Luckily for me, this was an easy fix. I just shaped my kneaded eraser into a wedge, patted out the softened edge, and redrew the hard edge. (The bottom image above) ‘Patting’ or ‘tapping’ your kneaded eraser to gradually lift graphite doesn’t disturb already drawn detail texture as much as pulling it across does. When you need to make an alteration this close to the finish of a drawing, always us the ‘pat’ method.
The whole image is now pinging some very deep responses in me, so I know it’s almost as I want it to be.
The Final Details
Before I talk about this final level of detail, I want to remind you of the importance of values. There used to be a t-shirt that read ‘If Mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.’ That sums up the situation with values very well too.
Values are the underlying structure of the drawing, or the Mama. If they aren’t right, ain’t nothin’ gonna be right. Your details won’t work no matter how wonderful they are if you’re drawing them on the wrong value. If those values are drawn well though, the amount of detail you add is entirely up to you because good supporting values can nearly carry the drawing by themselves. So, remember to make Mama happy first.
I love to add tiny details because I’m obsessive and very nearsighted. I have crystal clear close-up vision with my glasses off about six inches from my nose. Without my glasses, everything past that six inches is just blurred value. Depending on what I want to draw, I draw with my glasses on or off.
Now you know all my secrets.
This Drawing In Particular
The problem with this drawing is that I needed to have the reference on a screen that I could get on ‘nose level’ along side my drawing paper, so I loaded the photo into an iPad app called Copyit. It was awkward to hold, but it worked well visually.
Tools For Details
When I draw the final sharp details, I use extremely sharp pencil tips and fine eraser points. I spin down my electric eraser nibs into the thinnest point possible on a piece of paper, and then I usually only use that by hand by tapping or pulling it to erase, and not by spinning. A clean eraser picks up graphite better than a dirty one, so I keep it clean by pushing it into a kneaded eraser.
I’ve discovered that the Kemper Wipeout Tool for sculpture (a hobby of mine) makes an excellent detail erasing tool. The tips are made of rubber, one is a wedge, the other is a round point, and they are very stiff. (For those of you who are too young to know, rubber is an excellent eraser.)
Of course, if you use the tips like normal erasers they’ll lose their shape in no time, but if you just use them for precision work they’ll last a long time.
Clean the tips by pushing them into your kneaded eraser and they’ll eventually start to pick up a little bit of that eraser too. That’s ok because it makes them even better erasers. The tips on mine are showing very little wear and I use them constantly. This tool costs about six bucks at Amazon.
Hanging Out With Fairies
The left-side drops were drawn with my glasses off as I worked from an hugely enlarged reference on the computer screen. The right-side drops were brought into focus with my close-up vision as I worked from the photo reference on my iPad in the Copyit app at nose level. I added another drop and did some detail work on the petal too.
To focus these drops, I used sharp 2H and H pencils to draw the hard edges around them, paying attention to where the line was hard and where it was soft. Then I hand erased the highlights with the pointed tip of the electric eraser nib, or by using the wedge end tip of the wipeout tool.
To finish, I used an H or 2H pencil to darken the inside of each drop and reshape the erased highlight if needed, while also paying attention to hard and soft edges within the drop. I know that sounds like a lot of work, but I was drawing rain drops on a petal! That’s as close as you can get to actually hanging out with fairies, so I didn’t mind.
The Borders
I chided myself mercilessly for not having artist’s tape to keep my borders straight when I was drawing them, but I’ve kind of fallen in love with them now. The sides and corners are straight and square-ish enough, and they have the look of the maker’s hand. I think I’ll keep drawing my edges with just a straight line as a guide, even though I’ve already bought the tape. Damn.
Final Thoughts
My peony isn’t ‘radiant’ in the way I’ve always thought of the word, but the heavy round ripeness of flower, the drops of water, along with the supporting background leaves, does elicit a feeling of energy and life. I’m happy with how this drawing turned out.
Draw with outrageous pleasure and love,
Carol