Joyful Flowers and Exploring Joy with Colored Pencils
Let’s draw joyful flowers together, step by step! This post is enabled by the grant that I got from Arts Promotion Centre Finland. This is the fourth blog post of the project, see the first one here, the second one here, and the third one here!
Here’s what we will create: flowers that have joyfully gathered together and reach towards the light. No references, imagination only!
I made the drawing in my colored pencil journal and used colored pencils only. But these instructions can be easily applied to other mediums too.
Step 1 – Flowery Blobs
Pick a pencil of any color and draw blobs.
More than perfecting each flowery blob, make sure that the blobs are:
a) not similar in size – draw small, medium, and big blobs!
b) not separate – draw some only partly so that they go on the back of others!
c) not fully on the paper – draw some near the edges so that they are only partly visible!
d) not spread too evenly – leave some space too, but don’t place it in the middle!
This way, you set the foundation for joyful flowers so that you express diversity (a), togetherness (b), continuity (c), and freedom (d).
Step 2 – From a Blob to a Flower or a Leaf
Pick flowery colors and a black pencil for the background. Focus on the area in the low middle and work towards either side of the paper.
With black, color notches on the blobs so that they begin to look like flowers.
With bright and flowery colors, color some random shapes on the blobs.
Color a center for the blob to make it look more like a flower.
All the blobs don’t need the center; they can be leaves. You can also draw veins on them.
Add many colors so that the leaves and flowers look lively. Layer colors to get a variety of tones.
Step 3 – Background
Start with the black background, but gradually change to lighter tones. Leave a pitch-black area small, and add layers of other colors, like blue, on the top of the black, then gradually let the different colors take over. Leave a blank area too. Color softly and gently so that every layer adds intensity to the drawing.
One of the joys of coloring is to relax and not rush at all. Stay in a small area and work with a few flowers only (Step 1) before feeling confident enough to expand the working area and focus more on the background.
Step 3 – Setting the Colors for Joyful Flowers
You can mark the colors for each flower and leaf by coloring them carelessly first.
When some parts are more finished than others, there’s both joy of looking and joy of coloring!
Step 4 – Changing Most Whites to Pastels
I assume that you now have white everywhere: between the strokes, near the edges, in the flowers, and in many places on the background. But let’s change that! Leave only one area in the background that’s pure white and color over other blank parts.
Add more color on the areas where careless coloring has left white stripes, and change the larger white areas to pastel colors. All this makes the image more joyful because the joy is in the nuances, not in the big changes.
Step 5 – The Joy of Cohesion
One of the greatest joys in art-making is to feel togetherness. So more than trying to achieve a particular style, I make changes to the image so that it feels like a place where I belong. I also want my flowers and leaves to look happy, but not so that I force them to smile by throwing “happy colors” but imagining that everyone has a friend in the scenery: someone to trust and lean on.
I also make some flowers look like me: who need to feel free to bloom. So they are less defined and almost disappear into the light, but their spirit still looks strong. So, the less realistic a flower is, the more room there’s for the expression.
At some point in art-making, I begin to question if other people will like the image. It’s comforting to know that if we manage to create the feeling of effortless belonging, the image will naturally resonate more widely. The joy of cohesion also allows something to go wrong and become different than we expected. If we make every element feel accepted and welcomed, joy will naturally appear.
I a flower or a leaf looks lonely, add a stem that connects it with others. Long lines can look commanding and stiffen the image, so erase a glimpse of a stem only. Stems also look more natural if they don’t start right from the flower but appear and disappear as softly as possible. Stems can also go across each other and form a connecting mesh.
When one flower leads to another, and the eye always finds a clue about where to look next, cohesion is present.
More Inspiration for Joyful Flowers
I have got so many ideas from flowers that even when I don’t create them, my visual language is very flowery.
This week, I started two big oil paintings. These are 120 x 100 cm – it’s the biggest size that I have ever painted!
My first inspiration source for these is floral still lives from the 17th century. But these are just beginnings, and let’s see how they will progress in the upcoming weeks.
My little studio has been full of projects this week and will continue to be so!
I hope this blog post inspires you to create joyful flowers – big or small, pencils or paints!
How to Color like Monet – Step by Step Instructions
This week, I share the newest spread in my colored pencil journal and show how to make pages in Claude Monet‘s style.
This project is just simple flowers in a vase, but the layering of colors in an impressionistic style makes it special.
Supplies – Colored Pencils and Paper
I used watercolor pencils but mostly dry, so you can have any colored pencils for this project. My selection has some fancy Caran d’Ache Museum Aquarelle pencils, but mostly old Staedler Karat watercolor pencils.
Karat pencils are getting so short that I need an extender for convenient coloring, but they look endearing and I want to give them a long life!
Step 1 – Color Circles Across the Page
Let’s begin with circles. Color a variety – full circles, half-circles, hollow and filled ones, big and small! Pick only a few colors first, and only fill a diagonal that goes across the paper.
Color lightly so that you can add more layers on the top later. If you have watercolor pencils, you can spread the colors with water.
Step 2 – Color Short Stripes on the Top
Color short stripes over the circles. Now you can use a wider variety of colors and enlarge the size of the colored area.
I arranged my pencils so that they are grouped by color families. It helped a lot in this project, especially for the color areas in the next step.
Step 3 – More is More!
Continue coloring circles and stripes in various sizes and colors so that they fill the paper.
You can have so short and tiny stripes that they are more like spots. Stripes can go in different directions. Change the orientation of the paper once in a while.
Even if you color tiny elements, divide the page into big areas. The diagonal in Step 1 is one of them. Each area can have many layers and colors but decide which color will dominate. For example, I have a blue area on the left bottom corner.
Step 4 – Color a Dark Vase
Color dark stripes on either side of the centerline to form a vase. Leave some space between the stripes so that it looks like it’s dark glass.
You can also add some shadows below the vase to make it look more like Monet’s work. I used blue for them.
Step 5 – Highlight the Best Flowers
Add more bright colors and details to make a few flowers that catch the eye more than others.
I don’t draw any outlines, but continue to color freely in short strokes.
Step 6 – Make Sure That You Have Enough Variety
Color more so that you have a wider variety of colors and shapes. See how I have used both vertical and horizontal stripes on the left top corner. They look a bit like windows or trees. Monet often had abstract elements like these in his work.
When you color more, make sure that blank paper isn’t visible everywhere. Color lightly over the areas that are less important. When they don’t have any bright white, the overall impression is less busy.
Step 7 – Finishing Like Monet
Go through your colorings one more time. Color lightly over large areas to make them look more unified and add dark spots near the best details so that they become more noticeable.
Here’s a closeup of the finished work – lots of small dots, stripes, and layers!
Colored pencils are very versatile. You can really color like Monet! I like this painterly look a lot.
P.S. For more colored pencil inspiration, sign up for Intuitive Coloring!
P.P.S. Thank you all who have signed up already, we will have a lot of fun!
Intuitive Coloring – Examples and Thoughts
This week, I show sneak peeks and process pics of simple intuitive colorings and talk about intuitive art.
Since I made the last free video “Colored Pencils – Intuitive Approach,” I have been thinking about free coloring. First, it felt like I have explored it thoroughly in the e-book Coloring Freely and in the class Inspirational Drawing. But as soon as I began to make some notes about intuitive coloring, I realized that there are things that I haven’t shared in these blog posts or in my classes so far. Many of them are things that seemed complicated and heavy at first, but the more I have experimented with them, they appear to be very simple and light.
And it feels fun to color freely on a blank paper, and there’s a sense of playfulness too right from the beginning.
I am a more-is-more kind of a person, but after making a series of large oil paintings, I wrote a mental note that says “less is enough” in capital letters.
Can Intuitive Coloring Be Taught and Learned?
I have also been thinking about the term “intuition” a lot. Why does it feel so intuitively correct to say that my art is intuitive? And not only that. Why do I want to teach intuitive art? Because isn’t intuitive just about letting go and emptying the mind on paper? Doing what you want, doing what feels right?
But as a former engineer, it’s always been hard for me to trust intuition when I am trying something new or reaching for a new level. Then the intuition is confused with the comfortable “same-old-same-old” routine. That old dog always stays close, but intuition and imagination are timid puppies. To find the puppies – that’s where I feel I can help.
Would you be interested in this upcoming class?
Artist’s Life – What’s Boring and What’s Not!
This week, I make a watercolor painting and talk about how artist’s life can seem different than what it is.
Let’s turn back time and see how this painting came to life!
Is the Art Understood – A Story about Hilma af Klint
It’s a hot summer day, and watercolors are calling me. So I wet a paper, and after the water has soaked in, I start painting with a big brush.
The paper is Fabriano Artistico (cold press). I buy watercolor paper in big sheets and split them in half.
With the first strokes, I listen to the last minutes of an audiobook that has kept me company for a few weeks. It’s “Hilma af Klintin arvoitus” (The mystery of Hilma af Klint) by Pirkko Kotirinta. It’s a new book, published this year and currently only available in Finnish.
Even if the book is about Hilma af Klint (1862-1944), an interesting Swedish abstract pioneer, the companionship with the book hasn’t been pleasant. Mostly because I wanted to know about Hilma’s thoughts and philosophies – her inner life. But the book focuses on the external events and on the author’s background investigation for those.
When the book ends, I think about how people who admire artists from the outside perspective often romanticize things that are not romantic at all. There has been a lot of them around Hilma too. These people say: “The artist chose not to sell her art” or “The artist wanted to keep her art private,” but honestly, no professional artist wants that.
Instead, it can happen as it did for Hilma, that despite all the effort, the art was not respected or understood, and that breaks the artist’s heart. Hilma af Klint decided that the time would be more suitable later. So, she stated that her work had to be kept secret for 20 years after death.
Every artist wants to be current, but art has its own timeline. Sometimes it’s too far in the past, and sometimes – like Hilma’s – in the future. Painting freely is like a game where every layer is a new level. The result is unexpected, yet synchronized with the inner clock of the artist.
Boring and Not – Two Sides of Artist’s Life
People who look at artists from the outside perspective think that they live a carefree and eventful life. Therefore, they try to solve the mystery of Hilma af Klint by tracking the external events instead of internal ones. Artist’s handwritten diaries can be too confused, and it’s less complicated to travel from town to town and follow the actual footsteps. But most of Hilma’s life was spiritual, and her 193 gigantic temple paintings, laborious to create.
From the external perspective, art-making is one of the most boring things if you measure it by the amount of silence and concentration.
Here I am working with a flat brush.
However, what happens in the inner world, can make the artist’s life most exciting. We get to fly to a new land, find a color, be a color! We get to transmit a spirit through shapes and their interaction.
At first, accidental spots of color cause traditional associations: “Here could be a leaf, there a flower.” But when we let them go, a more personal layer opens: “Here’s something that reminds me of teenage years.” And slowly, more layers unfold, colors give room to shapes, and something that first sounded like a foreign language reaches the natural rhythm, and everything falls in place.
Negative painting – painting around the shapes – brings out light elements.
I work from light to dark and slowly add depth. The process of moving from traditional to natural is the toughest one for me. It requires to face many unpleasant memories – mental monsters that guard the paradise. From the outside perspective, I only make slow strokes for hours. But inside, I am crossing a storming sea feeling afraid of failure and success at the same time. The monsters are roaring on both shores and the only way to get through is not to beat but tame them.
This painting took two days and several sessions.
The monsters are often visible in my paintings too. People often point them when choosing their favorite details: “I like this. How did you do that?”
The two sides of art – the technical and the spiritual – are always present. Thus, art is always about both learning the strokes and living the strokes.
Paivi’s Watercolor Classes & Exhibitions
No matter what media you end up loving, watercolors have a lot to teach! Color washes, the negative painting technique, making simple shapes more elegant – all these techniques are useful for any art. Paivi likes to think about her watercolor set as a little assistant, always eager to work, and someone who sets her back on track.
- Watercolor Journey – outer and inner sceneries
- Floral Fantasies – loose and layered bouquets
- Magical Forest – intuitive watercolor painting
If you are in Italy or Finland, come to see Paivi’s watercolor paintings! “Shyeling” is displayed in the international group exhibition in Fabriano from June 20 to Oct 31. “Torchbearer” and “Maximalist” are displayed in the Akvart gallery in Helsinki from July 12-25, 2021.
Also check: Original watercolor paintings available in the shop