Orchids in coloured pencil and oil pastels

Mixed media piece - orchid in coloured pencil with oil pastel background. The paper is Canson Mi-Teintes, smooth side.

There's a story behind this painting. Flowers in coloured pencil are not on my radar, I don't remember the last time I did one - must have been many months ago. The main reason is flowers are finicky things with very delicate details, and drawing them with coloured pencils generally takes forever, with less than satisfying results.

But for the past couple of months, I've been plagued by a pretty debilitating bout of eczema, with the itch so intense that a tickly loose thread would throw me into a fit of rage. It has made my life pretty miserable and it's hard to think of anything else when all that occupies your mind is the need to scratch.

So I decided that I needed to do an art piece that would take a really long time and require all my concentration. It was a strategy of distraction. Hence, orchid in coloured pencil.

And a long time it really did take! Just drawing in this end flower on the edge of the paper took 2 hours.

These petals on the main orchid took another 2 hours. If you're wondering why it took so long, coloured pencil art is simply very laborious and time-consuming. It's worse for flowers because to get that soft, smooth look, you need to painstakingly colour one thin layer over another, over another, and blend, before repeating the process.

It took me a day (not in one sitting of course, I usually draw in spurts) to complete the main flower.

Here, I've coloured in the base layer of white on the orchid on the right to show what it first looks like. It would take about five more layers of different colours to get it to look smooth.

When I had completed the drawing, I placed it on the easel to have a look. I wasn't feeling it. I mean, it looked ok but it lacked punch. I felt that the light background didn't provide a good enough contrast with the flower, and made the decision to paint in a dark background using oil pastels.

Now, painting oil pastels after doing the flower is risky. Oil pastels are robust and sticky. If I did one wrong move and accidentally painted over the flower, the drawing would be ruined as it would be impossible to fix white pencil over dark oil pastels. Maybe it was the eczema that made me feel reckless.

So I proceeded carefully and I have to say, at this point, I started having doubts - it did look messy 😨

But in the end, I think the decision was a right one. The orchid stands out so much better against the dark background which looks rich and lush. The trick to oil pastels is you just need to blend like crazy so that the colours transition into each other. I don't have a black-green, so I mixed two dark greens (Mungyo Gallery and Sakura Cray-Pas) and my workhorse black oil pastel.

In total, this drawing took 3 days, and in that time, my eczema has subsided slightly, so I'd say everything turned out quite satisfactory in the end.