Pink Impatiens Colored Pencil Drawing

I recently completed three floral colored pencil drawings, which I've put up for sale on Etsy. This is "Pink Impatiens," a drawing with Prismacolor pencils on Strathmore Artgrain black paper. It's based on a photograph I took of impatiens growing in a garden.

It is available for sale on Etsy here.

Here is the finished piece:

And some detail shots:

I also took step-by-step photos of the progress as I was finishing this drawing.

First, I looked at the picture I was using as source material and looked at my colored pencil chart of how my pencils look on black paper, and chose a color palette. I don't always do this step - usually I just grab a pencil when I need it - but because I spent all that time making my colored pencil chart I wanted to actually use it. This way, I ensured that I would use only colors that would show up well on the black paper.

Then I drew the outlines of the flowers and leaves.

I slowly built up color, starting with some darker colors in the flower petals and browns in the leaves.

I knew I wanted to reserve some of the black paper to act as the veins of the leaves, so I made sure to spend a lot of time on the leaves early in the process to lay out how they would look.

Then I went back to the flowers and added lighter pink.

Some details of adding the red-orange layer to the flower centers:

Sometimes I work by doing all of one color throughout the whole drawing, and then moving onto the next color - but for this project, I worked flower-by-flower instead, using multiple colors in each new layer of the drawing to build up individual flowers.

I received lots of great responses on Instagram!

This drawing is available for sale on Etsy here.