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I actually just started by trying to come up with some inspiration from pinterest. I was just looking through cool art, and came across this really cool almost abstract piece of flowers in front of a house. I feel like I haven't done more realistic (not human) drawings in a while so I decided to experiment with that. And along with the idea of flowers came that comparison of annuals and perennials that is such a common distinction in many flowers. I thought about using annual, but it seemed too harsh so I decided to use perennial instead. I had to think of a perennial flower that I liked, and something that was bringt and joyful, I thought that echinacea reflected those ideas perfectly. They are bright, and a very hopeful color, and also they are really common so I thought that it might help push my message just that little bit further.

I started by using graphite pencil to sketch out my outlines. I tried to go pretty lightly because I knew that I wanted to use colored pencil over it so I wanted to make sure that the graphite didn't get in the way of the colored pencil at all. After I had sketched out the flower and especially all the leaves I began to color them in using colored pencil. I decided to use colored pencil because I was going for a more realistic rather than stylized look, and I thought that pencils would bring that strong color, while still keeping lots of details. I also used colored pencil for the words because I wanted them to match well with the color scheme and the general texture of the flowers.

As I said above I started by looking at some inspiration from other artsist on google and also the ones that have won in the past from FHS, and I remember I have struggled with making the poster very accessible before. Like I have had a decent drawing but it's hard to read, or the other way around, so I wanted to make sure I kept it kind of simple this year. I saw a couple of drawings and images that I liked when I looked up echinacea, and so I decided to use a similar method to what I do with the duck stamp and copy certain parts of each one so that I'm not making a direct copy of any of them. I used one image for the shading on the leaves, another for the petal placemen, and another for how I would arrange the three stalks.