Monday, May 4, 2015

Rosetacular!

Well, well, what do we have here?

  

Colored pencil, on paper, in the shape of a rose? A rose drawing? Complete? 100% feline approved??


I've been working on this little beauty for a little over 2 months, and I'm finally done with it. Good riddance! No, it was quite fun, and really turned out much better than I expected.

So I started out with some crummy phone pictures of a rose. Now, I was going to draw the rose while it was, y'know, still alive, but do I get anything done on time? Ha! No.

Rosetacular! Right? Now we move into how exactly you get from a sub-standard photograph to a (hopefully) above-average piece o' art. You already know I ditched the leaves. Why? I dunno, I thought about it. I just wasn't feeling it, I guess! I wanted something simple, I suppose.


A light sketch, and the laying down of a few colors. Feeling it out, hoping everything will look okay in the end. Then a bit more definition, and the addition of the stem. Clearly you can see that I am like "man, I do not want to get into all those layers." Do you know how many petals are smooshed into that rose? Too many, that's the correct answer. I took a slow and steady approach to the whole thing.


Slow and steady can win a race or two, I think. You can see I'm working from the outside in, and shading and defining everything as I go, tweaking everything bit by bit, petal by petal. At this stage you can see I'm mixing in more colors. And yes, I did use about 25 colored pencils for this project, with probably 10 of them getting the most use.


Clearly, there's only so long that the inner rose petals can be avoided.

Then, of course, things start to get tedious. And confusing. I try to define the shape and placement of each petal, but then there's the layers of colors to add, to make the shading, to make everything more rich and (hopefully!) more wonderful.

On the picture below, you can see that I'm going into the final stretch: all the petals are there, everything has color, and now it's just a matter of buildup, filling in the gaps and defining the details.


Once that's done? Oh, sweet victory-


It kinda looks like a rose, yay! It's all I ever wanted. Quite the journey, my friends. Are we all richer for the experience? I know I am.


 

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