This piece was a comfort drawing with a twist. I absolutely love drawing flowers and parts of skeletons, but I typically stick to drawing them in graphite and black ink. The twist to this comfort piece is that it is on black paper and colored pencil which I have worked with in the past. Working with black paper and colored pencils are very different than graphite and white paper.

The main difference is focusing on leaving space for the shadows which I struggle with every time I work with black paper. With this drawing, I sketched out the outline lightly in pencil and used a kneaded eraser to even everything out then drew the lightest colors on and slowly started blending in the darker colors. This way I struggled way less on focusing the shadows, unfortunately, I still had to use a black colored pencil to clean the shadows up. Another thing that I do to all my works is clean up the dust that the colored pencils or graphite pencils leave around the paper. The way I clean the dust is to scan the drawings to the computer and use Photoshop to use the stamp tool to match the paper. When scanning in black paper drawings I notice the dust is a lot worse and there is a shine just on the paper from the light that the scanner uses. Instead of using the stamp tool I typically just use the black pen to basically draw over the dust and shine. In-person, you are not really able to see the dust so I do not think this is a cheat more as fixing the piece that is more accurate to the original piece.

Falling Flower was a really fun piece to work on. I was excited to see the progress that I have made with using black paper. Let me know your thoughts on this piece on Instagram.

Thank you for reading, stay strange.