"Creativity" Colored Pencil Drawing

The last colored pencil drawing I made before packing up all my art supplies to move was this 8"x10" drawing of dahlia flowers on blue paper, completed back in August 2020. Dahlias symbolize many things (including some personal symbolism for me, given the dahlia tattooed on my arm), but one of the big ones is creativity, which is why I gave the drawing the title "Creativity."

I used Prismacolor pencils and blue Canson Mi-Tientes paper. I started with a quick line sketch of how I wanted to lay the dahlia flowers out on the page, and then filled in the shapes to make quick monotone value studies with the same pink pencil - coloring more pink in areas that were lighter, and leaving more of the darker blue paper showing in areas of the petals that were in shadow.

Once this preliminary sketch was in place, I grabbed more pencils and started going through petal by petal to give the flowers more depth and dimension. I used white for highlights, purple and black for shadows, and three shades of pink/red in between.

Here is the final drawing:

I love the way the pink pops against the blue paper (and the blue paper gives the dahlia a nice blue undertone, so that its coloring is a realistic purplish pink dahlia color)!