The Creative Color Challenge #2 - Raspberry Red

Blood Lily, 300 x 300 mm, soft pastel & charcoal on black pastel paper

And this is my entry for the second Creative Color Challenge - Raspberry Red. It proved to be an interesting challenge despite me having drawn many flowers before. Firstly, this flower does not exist, I made it up from various references (mainly stemming from the basic oriental lily) so I had to work light and shadow myself, and also, to work light and shadow correctly you usually use contrasting colours, something the challenge did not allow, so I was reduced to juggling black and whites to get the shades I needed.  I think I mostly succeeded, but the addition of other colours would definitely bring more life into it.

This was also not my first choice in subject, after all, flowers, been there done that many, many times.  My original idea was to draw a phoenix in a style reminiscent of fireworks (think Fellowship of the Ring and Gandalf's fireworks dragon), but I couldn't gel a design quickly enough.  It would also be a bigger project with quite a bit more of a challenge to it and since my biggest challenge in this whole exercise is to actually finish something, I decided that was more important.  I also had the idea of a dancing brolga in reds and whites and greys, but again, great idea, not enough time.

So we have a Blood Lily. I did learn a few things from this exercise. Charcoal turned out to have some interesting attributes when it came to darks, lights and edgings.  Also, I had to purchase some rather expensive red pastels as my current stock couldn't do the job I needed it to do. Oh, well, any excuse to go buy art supplies ::grin::

Nutty
(I finished another one!!! Yay!!)