February Flowers

I only want to do flowers.  No hearts, snow scenes, pine trees... just flowers.

I love drawing with pen (no pencil sketch first).  It makes me honest.  I recently found a good sale and splurged on a set of 5 Prismacolor fine-tip illustration pens.  I had been using fine Sharpies if I was going to paint on it, but those were not as reliable, and I like having tip choices.  I am really loving these pens!

I also love this old wildflower book I found at a yard sale.  In the absence of fresh flowers, it offers much lovely inspiration.

I have been enjoying some experimental stuff as well.  The above was playing with liquid watercolor, acrylic and paint pens, with some Gelli print cutouts.

This was an old pen drawing of a ruffly tulip that I grew and picked last spring.  These sedimentary watercolor pigments made an interesting effect around it... not sure I love it, but it's interesting.

More watercolor and paint pen...

And I'm not sure why I thought it would be a good idea to glue down some textured paper before a flower drawing, but I did and it's a little weird.

After doing that one, I came across some YouTube videos about paper piecing with Gelli prints.  So I used the above sketch to make a traced pattern and cut out the pieces from Gelli prints.  This was a surprisingly hard project... it is hard to get values right and it did not turn out like I had envisioned, but I sort of like the results.  It was fun to try.

In close-up you can see that I used some oil pastels for a few marks here and there.

For the rest of the month, I am going to try to keep up with some lettering/watercolor floral challenges on Instagram.  I have yet to actually start, now 5 days into the month.  But I'll attempt to do what I can.  I think this is the last "slow" month before things really get busy for the spring and summer.