Yellow Rose Challenge

I

decided to challenge myself yesterday and see if I could do a painting in a day. This is on an 8" x 10"piece of white Ampersand pastel board.

The first photo is the watercolor under-painting. Because Ampersand is really grainy I figured the white would be sort of hard to cover with colored pencil and I wanted to get the white covered quickly without having to worry about having a lot of little white flecks showing through the colored pencil.

I laid down the watercolor in the morning and then took a couple hours to run errands while it dried. I started adding the CP around 2 PM. My husband was not home for dinner and it's good he was not. After a quick lunch break I worked pretty steady on it. When I looked at the clock again it was 7 PM and it was completed! That's an amazingly quick turn around for a CP painting!

I have to admit I did play a little bit with it today to tweak the darks and the veins in the outer petals but 99% of the work was done yesterday afternoon.

What I learned from this painting is when working on Ampersand you don't need as many color layers to get a good color mix and build up. I also like the way the pencil blends with a cut off bristle brush. It gives a smooth finish to the pencil. Also if you try to mix darker colors with a pencil that is too light you end up with a chalky look to the color. It’s best to blend with a darker value pencil of a similar hue.