Spring Freesia Posy Painting

This is one of my latest paintings.

"Spring Freesias" on colorfix paper. 24x30cm.

Along with the daffodils the freesias were some of the first flowers to appear in the garden, and they gave it such a lift after the bareness of winter. I picked a bunch and their colours inspired me to paint them. I had some dark blue coloured colorfix paper and decided to try coloured pencils. I am not very experienced with coloured pencils but was pleased with the outcome.

I like working on a dark background as it can make the colours 'sing' and often use dark backgrounds for my acrylic and pastel paintings. With the pencils it was difficult to establish the whites, but they did eventually come forward.

Here are some WIP photos.

I started off with a drawing of the posy. I then traced this onto tracing paper. I don't normally do this but as the background was dark and I didn't want to damage the colorfix ground, I thought it necessary in this instance.

To transfer the image, I coated the back of the tracing paper with chalk and then traced it onto the colorfix using a coloured pencil so that I could see where I had been!

I then started to block in the colours and continued in this vein laying lots of layers of colours on the way. Finally I fixed it and laid in a final layer of colour. The white needed a few more layers than the other colors but came good in the end.