I attend a weekly art group at the Canterbury Umbrella Centre and this week the teacher brought in real flowers for us to draw and paint with pastels. Canterbury Umbrella Centre is a local charity in my area that offers services for the community. It’s vital for those struggling with disabilities, mental health and loneliness.
First I drew out an initial sketch. I tried doing shapes initially but it just wasn’t working out for me so I went for my normal style of drawing. Art books will teach you to use shapes, but I think any way of starting is fine as long as it keeps the process fun. I tend to play around with both depending on the drawing. Starting with shapes with help you keep your drawing from extending off the page but I find it can make things look a bit too rigid sometimes.
I find pastels tricky as they smudge easily and it’s hard to get details into the corners of your sketch. Having a spare piece of paper to rest on helped to reduce the smudging. I might try pastel pencils if I feel I need more detail. Overall I’m happy with how it’s going and better than some of my previous pastel attempts! I was finding blending difficult without blending the colour into the paper.
Next time I brought my pastel pencils along, to discover that I didn’t really have any compatible greens or pinks with what I’d already done. Therefore I continued with the thicker pastels. It’s very challenging getting the detail into the petals, especially the small inner ones. Using such big materials means I had to change the way I would normally approach an image. This makes it more of a challenge!
I found some different pastels at group and what a difference it makes. These ones were a lot smoother and adhered to the paper much better. I went over my previous work with the new ones and completed the flower on the right. Lastly I went over the background with the electric rubber to clean up any marks.
Finally I dusted off the eraser marks and colour smudges and switched to my bridge camera to take a final image.
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