anika mari

As I was working on the drawings, I knew that i wanted to have a flower that was big and bold.

My sister-in-law had originally chosen two sketches of flowers that she liked from my sketchbook.

She was drawn much more to the peach and green drawing, but I liked the softer blue drawing, so for a while I was a little stalled out about what to do.

It wasn’t until I drew on a “scrap” piece of bristol that the idea started to evolve. I wanted to get used to drawing on the bristol, which was the material I was using for the final drawings, so I drew three of the bluish flowers. However, when they were drawn, they were a little more elongated than the original sketch, and reminded me more of pine cones than of flowers. So I went with it, and I started to color them in like pine cones.

Before finishing the color, I decided to try out a few combinations on little mini sketches.

Finding a combination of colors that I liked, I finished the drawing.

Looking back at the little sketches, I thought they looked like little clusters of petals and thought they might make a pretty flower. On an extra piece of bristol, I drew a number of little petal clusters in a radial pattern, and then connected them with thin stems.

I really liked how this turned out, so I tried several color combinations in my sketchbook.

I liked the softness of the first two, but I decided that I really wanted a bold, colorful flower. After working on the sketch with many color possibilities, I decided on going with a bold background, and light petals.

I discovered that the colors blended beautifully on the paper in my sketchbook, but would hardly blend or soften at all on the bristol. Also, the color of the marker on the bristol tends to show up significantly darker or brighter, so I had to adjust the colors slightly as I was working.

The mulberry color I used for the background showed up really intense on the bristol, but in a good way. However, after testing the blue that I intended to use, it was much too bright on the bristol, so I ended up using a light gray for the petals instead of blue. The gray was a lot softer which helped balance the drawing, while maintaining the contrast of light to dark.

I like how the drawing and colors turned out. It lends the right amount of bold color to the series.

In the next post I’ll write about how fruit ended up in the pea pods drawing.