Mothers carry us

Mothers carry us....in so many ways.

Happy Mothers Day to all the mothers.

Dog and cat moms too! ❤️

🎨  FOR ARTISTS:

People who follow my work know that I often use an underpainting (watercolor wash) to “tint” the paper a certain color, as my base color to work on, and then do colored pencil over that. This piece was created during a period when I was exploring how much I could use paint in my colored pencil pieces. It has not only an underpainting of greens for the foliage and red-brown for the steps, but I also used opaque acrylic paint to make the white, yellow, and red flowers, to get brighter colors than I could with colored pencil alone. The details of the foliage, flower stems, the steps, and the figures, was done with colored pencil. This piece was done in a looser style with both the paint, and my pencil strokes. 

These close-ups show some of the loose pencilwork and how I used the underpainting.

1

A few loose scribbles make the stems and leaves of flowers over the green and gold underpainting. The white flowers are dabs of white acrylic paint.

2

The figures' hair and skin was created with impressionistic strokes of colored pencil. The details of their clothing are pencil strokes over an underpainting of aqua-green (the shirt) and light blue (pants and child's dress) that tinted the paper in those areas. Dabs of pink, red, and yellow acrylic paint made the flowers. Only a few scribbles of pencil were needed to clarify the steps over peach and rust-brown underpainting.

3

I particularly like the way just a few lighter and darker pencil strokes give the impression of foliage on a watercolor wash made of splashes of different greens and golds allowed to flow into eachother with a "wet-in-wet" technique. The dabs of opaque acrylic paint added with a large brush make much brighter yellow flowers than I could have achieved with yellow pencils. Yellow is a particularly weak color in colored pencil.

Prismacolor pencil, watercolor, and acrylic paint on Canson Mi-Teintes paper

20 x 26 inches

⭐️  “Mothers carry us” will be released soon as a 12 x 16 giclee print. ⭐️ 

Message me for more info.