Tulip Drawing with Prismacolor Premier pencils

Today I share with you a drawing of tulips I made, based on a photo from Kirsty Partridge's Coloured Pencil Academy course. This was the first larger project, where I picked all of the pencil colours from start to finish, and decided which colours go where, in which order, rather than just following a tutorial, where most aspects are planned for you.

For this exercise I chose to use Prismacolor Premier pencils, on Strathmore Bristol Vellum, 300 series paper. Swatching colours took me a while. Once I was satisfied with a combination, I made sure to write down which pencils I used, in which order and intensity.

Below are the pencils I used. All pencils that I started with (except for white and black) were full length. You can see how much I used some of them (olive green) by their final length, although some of the loss of length was due to internal pencil breakage, which meant additional sharpening.

Since I have never done a project of this size (approx. 8.5 by 10 inches) in this medium, I decided to work in small areas. I started out with leaves and then proceeded to flowers, finishing with the cast shadows.

Once I had all the components more or less drawn, I printed out black and white version of my current drawing and the original photo, in order to compare and adjust my balance of values as necessary.

Afterwards, I made some final tweaks to the colours and shapes, and added a delicate shading at the borders. Overall, it was a fun project. I decided to amplify the detail on the petals and leaves, as I found it visually interesting and felt that it gave the composition a bit more character. Thank you so much for visiting. Have a wonderful day.