Beautiful Oops

Black Eyed Susans

Colored pencil, white pen and marker

12.75 x 9.5 in

This is my beautiful oops project, for this project we receive a piece of paper with ink drops on it and use our imagination to create a piece of work from it. I had multiple large ink drops on my paper that reminded me of the shape and color of the center of black eyed susans. My grandmother grows lots of flowers and black eyed susans are some of the ones she grows so I took inspiration from those as well as doing research on how to accurately depict these flowers. In my research I learned they grow in larger patches usually than the one I had planned on drawing so I revised my plan. I also noticed in most the picture I saw of these flowers there was almost always a dead flower somewhere so I added one to my piece.

My work was made starting with graphite when I sketched the flowers out, I then moved on to colored pencils but I wanted crisper lines so I outlined the flowers in their respective colors but with marker. I wanted to give the flowers a simple environment behind them so I went with a plain blue sky and added glow from the sun in the corner. I also tried to add clouds with my white ink pen but it didn't really show up well so you can only see the clouds if you look close. After doing all this I knew the piece was still missing something and I really wanted to add a pop of red so I researched red butterflies and drew one sitting on a flower.

While creating this piece, I was very focused on trying to create a good balance with the curves of the flowers while trying to keep the flowers realistic as they would probably be facing the sun. I also viewed the butterfly that I added as a contrast to the more neutral tones shown throughout most the rest of the work. I originally wanted to draw these flowers coming up out of a rock wall but with researched learned they grow more in fieldy areas so I changed my plan. Surprisingly, the butterfly is my favorite part of the work despite it being a last minute decision but my sky-skape could use more work.