"28 Years" - Year #3

For general information about this 22"x30" colored pencil drawing, see this blog post.
For more information about the flower symbolism I used (Years 1-14) and life events that led me to select those particular flowers, see this blog post.

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My third floral arrangement (symbolizing the third year of my life, the year that I was two years old), is made up of aster and white lilac.

• Aster: symbol of patience, elegance, daintiness, protection (through the eyes of God), and wistful hindsight (a desire that things had happened differently)
• White Lilac: symbol of the joy of youth, youthful confidence, purity, and innocence

I drew the two flowers in graphite pencils to sketch out the composition. Then I started drawing in the stems with green colored pencils.

Here are the botanical illustrations I looked at in creating this composition (I do not own these two images; I found them on Google):

I colored in the leaves of the aster (the greenery on the left side) as well as the leaves of the white lilac (in the right side), using slightly different colored pencils to differentiate the two.

Then I started filling in the big pink aster flower.

I lightly sketched in the white lilac blooms, then erased the extra graphite pencil lines. Then I filled the white lilac in with (you guessed it) white pencil. Other colors were added on top of the white (blue, pink, yellow) to show shadows and different petals. Even something that is called "white" is not 100% white if you look closely.

And now Year #3 is also complete! Here is the whole drawing so far, 3/28ths of the way done: