Drawing Plants and Flowers in coloured pencil

I love flowers. especially really large blooms which are bold and have big architectural forms. Really admire the work of Georgia O'Keefe whose often very closely cropped compositions become almost abstracted and at times have a sexual aspect to them.

However, despite the fact that I find flowers attractive as a potential subject. I wasn't looking forward to this exercise for several reasons: Firstly, my previous attempts to draw flowers have resulted in frustration, I have not been able to capture the delicate and sometimes translucent quality of flower petals. My heart also sank when I read that this was to be a large  scale drawing using my least-favourite medium of coloured pencil. Although I felt that I had made some progress in building up colours by layering, I still didn't really enjoy working with these and I knew that this piece would involve a considerable investment of time and effort.

As I had struggled with the depiction of plants and flowers in the past I decided to try out a few sketches in my sketchbook first as I thought this would help me to be more relaxed about the exercise. First I tried drawing a close-cropped view of one of the hibiscus flowers on the patio. Unfortunately, first I was invaded by red spider mites which crawled all over the paper and got inadvertently squashed leaving orange marks. Then it started to rain so  I quickly abandoned this attempt. 

I then went on to try drawing some roses I had picked from the garden. This attempt was somewhat more successful than my previous attempts at flowers in that the results did look recognisable as a representation of a rose. However, I didn't leave the highlights light enough and the overall effect didn't capture the luminosity of the rose.

Next I moved on to planning the composition of my piece. I had bought a begonia from the local garden centre which had fantastic variegated foliage. It screamed 'draw me!' when I walked past it in the shop. This probably would have provided sufficient textural and colour interest on its own but as the title was 'plants and flowers' and I needed to overcome my problems with drawing flowers I decided to draw this along with some cut garden roses.

I decided to make the begonia into an area of foreground interest in the lower part of the composition with the vase of roses forming a taller element in the background. I really enjoyed the sketchbook drawing. I like this scribbly 'shorthand' way of representing forms. I placed the whole arrangement in front of a bed with a duvet draped over the bedstead providing some interesting creases in the background.

The larger piece was another matter entirely. Some of the other students have described this exercise as a 'labour of love'. For me it was more like several days of torture! I really didn't enjoy this so I didn't get that lovely feeling of being absorbed in what I was doing with time slipping by unnoticed. In the end I had to set a timer and persuade myself to do this an hour at a stretch otherwise I would not have been able to force myself to sit down to finish it. The disadvantage of this approach was that the drawing took place over several days which meant the the cut flowers changed markedly in appearance in that time.  By the second day the red rose bud had completely opened up. On the third day all the petals fell off the yellow/pink rose and by the end all of the roses were quite sad and wilted. I had mapped out the composition  on day one but had not finished drawing the roses as I was working all around the composition. This meant that I had to work from memory on the roses and I think they have suffered as a result.

I have abandoned this exercise before, in my opinion, it is really finished. I had intended to put more work in on the woven doyley the plant was sitting on and to darken some of the main shadows under the plant. I think this means it lacks the impact I was aiming for. I really couldn't  face spending any more time working on this one. 

Having described all the negatives about this exercise, I do have to add that there are some areas of the picture that I am quite pleased with. The area I enjoyed the most was the foliage. I particular, describing the marked difference in colour between the upper and lower sides of the leaves. The foliage itself was so beautiful, that a drawing of it couldn't fail to be interesting.  I've taken some shots of areas of the drawing that I am happy with. 
In retrospect, I think it  would have been better to concentrate on this foliage and exclude the vase of roses from the composition. The more I am drawn to a subject the easier it is to draw it - in this case I put the roses in to challenge myself because I knew I'd find them difficult - and this proved to be true.