Poppy Progress

The Poppies are progressing really well, and I am looking forward to getting the last flower laid in in watercolour so that I can get to the coloured pencil. I am finding that I learned so much from the last disaster with the rose, and it is saving me a lot of time and heartache with this one.

I am working at laying in the watercolour in a lot more careful way. I am working wet into wet for the first layer and making sure I take the highlights out and then adding a wet onto dry layer adding in tonal areas and some detail. I used to use the watercolour to primarily cover large areas, which the pencils don't cover well without showing a lot of pencil marks, or that will be very labour intensive, but I am now trying to use it more as a base that the coloured pencils can complete. Mentally this is great also because it speeds the process up so much, and there is a more immediate idea of where the work is going. The coloured pencil part is so time consuming when you do a lot of it, and can get quite demoralising when you work and feel as though you are making no progress, but this appeals to my impatient nature and means that it is achievable to create a lot more work in the limited time I have available. All I need to do now is not much it up from here!