COLORS OF SPRING

Winter and Spring dance around each other

Bleak, grey clouds wrap up the sun

Burst of flowers flood the world with colors

Swirling rain and snow squabble over fingers and toes

Spring sun catches your spirit and flowers open with joy

There is no Spring without Winter

Does Winter need Spring?

Here in the Bay Area in Northern California, we are in the middle of Spring already. The daffodils are gone, camellias edged with brown hang their droopy heads, and Spring green leaves have unfurled. Other flowers, primroses, pansies, rosemary, fuchsias, and deer's ears, push their way into view. I want to capture what I see. All this activity is a good reason for me to do another 30-day challenge.

I pick a piece of cold press watercolor paper, which has a roughness that catches the paint and I draw a 2" square grid across the paper. In each square, I pencil in one of the flowers I see in our yard. I set out to paint them and discover I could not capture the intense Spring colors of the flowers. I needed Opera, a bright pink and a blue that wasn't Cerulean, Cobalt or Aquamarine. My palette didn't contain anything close. I turned instead to colored pencils.

Usually, when I use colored pencils, I draw on hot press paper, which is as smooth as copy paper and allows me to color in a flat wash with no paper showing through. I also normally use a blue pencil to draw the outline of the image. A regular pencil's outlines will show through the colored pencil giving me hard edges all around the object. I could have started over, but this was supposed to be fun, a way for me to make a daily quiet practice. I forged ahead with what I had. A couple of good tips about using colored pencils: shade the area by drawing overlapping circles to avoid seeing pencil lines and layer colors one on top of the other to give a more luminous view.

Love sunflowers? They mean more today than ever. Check out the sunflowers posted by artists all over the world here:

https://www.artistsnetwork.com/art-inspiration/sunflowers-for-ukraine-artists-solidarity/?utm_campaign=Artists%20Network%20-%20Newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=206175726&utm_source=hs_email