Sunday, February 16, 2014

A Gift for my mum

It was my beautiful mum's Birthday yesterday - Happy Birthday Mum!

She's one of these people who's difficult to buy for, has everything and more than she will ever need in her lifetime, plus her and dad always make a big song and dance when we do buy them things :)

So I decided to do a drawing.  I wish I had taken some work in progress pics as the finished product looks nothing like it did in the beginning.  I made a fair number of changes as I went along.

This is my first try at a 'Flip' (one of Helen Williams from alittlelime specialties) and I am so happy with how my flower turned out! Thank you Helen, your ebook and video made it much easier for me. and I even learnt a few things.  One thing I did take away from the lesson was the imaginary middle point of a flower - I had no idea!  Now that I do know I will be more diligent to get that correct.  When I started sketching the first petal I was not aware of that, so my flower may look a bit wonky.

I continued by adding more petals, a stem and a couple of  leaves, (now those I need to practise, as I got one of those wrong).  I really liked the minimalist look, however, I really wanted to add tangles - and I did :)  I wanted a grid background  and chose 'Quiltz' by Kim Barlow - I don't spend a lot of time choosing tangles as my theory is, if I don't like it, then so be it, it's only paper.  I don't usually use pencil or a ruler, but this time I used both.  Besides for shading I used pencil to sketch my petals and leaves as suggested by Helen and because I wanted this piece to look more even, I used a ruler.

Originally, this was going to be black and white with some shading - well! wouldn't you know it, even as careful as I was with ruling the grid I accidently ruled through one of the petals :(  I was so annoyed with myself .... so now I had a dilema, how was I going to fix it?  the only thing I could think of was to add patterns to the petals  ... so I did.

That was fine, the petal dilema was resolved, but now it looked busy busy.  Thinking, thinking, that's ok too when I add some shading and fill it will make the flower pop - right?  Nope, no siree...... now what to do?  I then went on and added some gold colour to the petals.  Nope still lacked life so I blackened areas around the petals as it looked very fussy in between, especially when you only see some of the background lines of Quiltz.  That seemed to do the trick but it still lacked something.

So my last idea - it was going to make it or break it!!  I decided to add some red Prismacolour to the flower and green to the leaves....... thinking the whole time, what have I done!!  I don't have time to start a new.

Then it dawned on me, add some yellow to blend the colours in, so I did..... and this is it.

I hope you like it and got some insight as to how it came about.

Thank you for taking the time to stop by and I would love to receive some feedback.




2 comments:

Thank you for your visit :)