Mallow flowers - planning

If you're looking at the blog site, I hope you'll notice that I've fixed the header (yay)!  Took a fair amount of work and a bit of CSS code (which I've never done before), but I think it's here to stay.  Which is good, because I have other things to spend my time on!

As I said in my last post, I started working on the mallow flowers again.  This time, I decided that for once I would follow all the appropriate steps for a finished painting - no shortcuts.  Although this will definitely tax my patience (it's a long process and I don't work very quickly), I think ultimately it will be worth it!  So...back to basics.  The first step in planning a painting (after choosing and arranging your subject) is the drawing.

I figured that since the drawing was going to have to be accurate and there will be a lot of work shading, etc that I would not simply use sketch paper.  I pulled out a sheet of one of my nicer drawing papers and mounted it to a board.  I began by laying down the rough circle and elliptical outlines of the flowers and where I'd like them to be on the paper.  From there I started adding some of the detail like the centres, stems, and leaves.

As you can see (even with the blurry image), it's a very rough drawing but you can see where things are headed.  I neatened up the lines, erased the placement circles, and prepared to start the detail!

Because this is a map and not a final drawing, I thought it might be safe enough to make this part of the project more portable.  I am pretty slow at this, and a lot of my time is spent in the family room with the girls.  I'd like to be able to pick up the picture during slow moments (i.e. when the girls are watching tv) and still be in the room with them.  I tried it today after the girls went to bed.  It wasn't too bad working on the couch, though I will have to sharpen my pencils before I come down - they get dull pretty quick.

Here's my progress so far.  I'm trying to establish where the light, medium, and dark tones are, as well as where the hard and soft edges need to be.  It's interesting in that I'm having to make some changes on the fly as I'm working from a photo reference and of course the light in the photo can blur edges that I will need to harden in the painting.  I'm only working with 3 pencils: HB, 4B, 6B to establish my tones.  I also want to pay attention to the contrast of the piece.  I have some good flow in the design having given an "s" shape to the object placement.

I'm more comfortable in my drawing skills than my painting skills, so I like that this "map" is allowing me to learn the details of the piece before I set a brush to it.  My last real flower painting used short cuts - I used photo imaging software to see the grey tones and did a rough sketch directly onto the watercolour paper, and I had to make quick judgements and decisions while my paper was drying and other crises were creeping up.  While it made for an exciting project, I can't say that I do well under that kind of pressure continuously.  I'm hoping that if I can get my ego around doing things in order, that I will have a better time painting.