Trying my hand at painting zinnias

I planted a garden of zinnias at the library where I worked last year. I also planned a program around sunflowers and we got much patron participation. We also received a lot of wonderful comments.

A nice thing occurred for this year. Due to COVID, all of our library programming was canceled. Because the onset of COVID came in the beginning of spring, I was not able at the library to do the planting of the flowers this year. What was nice is that we had a bunch of "volunteer" seeds that decided to sprout. So even though our garden is not at the level of last year, it is still beautiful.

I did not paint any of the flowers from last year's garden although I took many photographs. I decided on Saturday to paint some that I have picked and placed in a vase.

I was only planning on drawing and painting one zinnia but I just kept on adding more and more. I used pen first to draw it all out and then used my Inktense pencils and palette to add color. The one thing that I don't like about the Inktense pencils is the color selection of the pencils that come in the package. So many of the vivid colors of spring are not included and they are hard to mix; colors such as purple which can be hard color to create in its own right. Here is what it looked like when I was done.

I got a lot of nice comments on Facebook and Instagram. It makes me want to do a "real" painting of zinnias. I took a bunch of photos today so maybe I will do that next.

Thanks for reading!