My World

I continue to progress in decreasing the learning curve of more life like sketches to the point of adding more color interests in some. I’m still not comfortable adding color. Even the best possible quality color pencils such as Prismacolor have a different feel and handling than graphite Fabercastell sketching pencils. But I am determined to get there.

I started out with a thought to draw a female cardinal on a snow sprinkled berry branch wanting to highlight the black and white sketch with red berries to compliment the small red spots of a female cardinal. This way, there would be no doubt the bird is a female companion piece to the previous male cardinal I recently sketched.

I was excited to create the branch first, complete with berries…….. first mistake! I was so engaged in coloring the berries and bringing the branch to life that I forgot what it takes to create snow on a pencil drawing! There is one tiny but extremely important step, especially when using colored pencils that I omitted😐. The illusion of white snow is created when leaving the spaces the snow will occupy Blank. Yep. It is a backward thought process that I’m still working to accomplish. Having colored all the berries completely with no bare spots to become snow, there was no going back. Snow-covered branches would have been easier to correct by carefully erasing areas. But there is no erasing color, especially dark red.

Determined not to be defeated, this sketch became a springtime portrait rather than a wintry one. One nice thing about sketching is that there is always a page waiting to create another sketch 😀! I shall, at some point master the art of snow-covered branches. Just not in this day.

So, with no further ado, I introduce to you the Queen of the berry throne.