Roses

Hi Peeps! I have something quite different for you today.  I decided to stretch my horizons and take a class at Kit And Clowder.  It was a real challenge for me! I wanted to learn more about coloured pencil, and so I took Alyce's coloured pencil class for February, and these Roses were the image used in the class.  The image itself (uncoloured digital line drawing) can be found at Power Poppy and it is called, "Everything's Rosey".  I printed it very faintly so that the lines would not show (known in the rubber stamp community as "no lines colouring).  For this lesson, I decided to print it at approx 4x5 inches on my 5 x 7 paper.  Let me say this; paper is important.  The stuff I used was not meant to take the punishment I gave it, and the coloured pencils sometimes started tearing and disintegrating where I went over it too hard and too many times.  Next time, I'll get the proper paper before I attempt another one of these!

I have been asked how I did the background.  I simply followed (loosely) the instructions from Alyce in the class: layer, layer, layer, and with much time and patience, this is what I came up with.  I did stray a lot from the style of colouring Alyce shows in the class, but the principals are the same.  Just layer after layer to get the effect you want. 

 I felt it was important to include some of the cup colours and roses and leaves colours into the background.  When you do that, you bring in a sense of unity to the picture, by having some of the foreground colours included in the background. 

I'm beginning to create blackish areas using colour opposites; in this case, dark greens combined with dark reddish colours like Indian Red and Caput Mortuum. 

 I did use some black, but to be honest, by this point, it was not going down as black; it was rather, sitting atop all the layers and giving me a grey layer. I just went with it!

 I went over the cup again using some of the same dark blues I had used on the background, adding touches of those colours onto the "white" parts of the cup, to unify the picture some more.  It is always effective to use colours that are close to the white object, on the white object, since white reflects the colours that are surrounding it.  I also deepened the shading on the yellow parts of the cup.  For the finishing touches, I used black in the deepest parts of the shading on the roses - just a touch here and there, of black in all the shadows.  You can really see the difference in the depth those final touches make by looking at the previous picture as opposed to this one below. 

Thank you for looking!