For the love of Tulips!

Welcome to Inspire Me Monday on Power Poppy! This is Rhea, and today, and I am sharing Tulips in Hobnail Pitcher.

This is a digital image which has been enlarged to 200%.  It is now framed in black with a black and white matting and proudly hanging on my wall of framed Power Poppy florals.

What I wanted to share with you today is the foliage.  If you look at the depth of the foliage, it was created using many different shades of greens. To make something look like it is in the distance, it needs to be a little darker with more of a gray tone to it. If you are using Copic Markers. this means you want to move more to the center of the Copic Color Wheel.  

I like to start with the shadows first, or in this case, what is in the background. I started with YG61, 63 and 67 and colored the leaves that were behind the front leaves. Next, in the deepest shadow areas I added G94 and 99 as these have more gray tones to them. Now, I moved to the leaves that were in the front.  I used YG25, 17 with the highlight yellowish color being YG21. With these colors being more vibrant and lighter, it helped bring them forward.

Now for the Tulips!  There are several colors used here — ones you can’t imagine using together: V52, 63, 66, 69, 12, 15, 17, and Y00.... Say what!?!?! Yup, that's right. It’s all done in layers in the order listed with Y00 being the last added where I left white starting at the end and flicking into the violets and purples. These colors blend so well together and I actually had no idea what the plan was as I was just playing.  I figured I could always start over!

Now back to G99, I added this color to add drop shadows under the leaves and flowers and blended a little with G94.

For the pitcher....Mackenzie Childs Pottery is one of my loves, so I added the signature checkerboard pattern and just went for it. Although it isn’t perfect, I just don’t care because it is art! I used a multiline .08 in black to outline the black squares, and a Copic Spica marker (glitter marker) to add dots of texture to the cream squares. The final touches were to add a touch of color around the flowers and using V20 to ground the pitcher.

That’s how you take a flat image and add depth. :)