The Viola Adventure

Who would have thought that this innocuous little flower could cause me so much grief? I have agreed to do a little step-by-step demonstration for the UKCPS stand at the forthcoming Art Materials Live event in Birmingham. The task has turned out to be far less straightforward than I envisaged.

Here are four of my five attempts to recreate a Viola (or Violas) for this task. One is on Fabriano 5 paper and the other three are on ordinary sandpaper (Fine Grit 600) from a local DIY shop and they were all abysmal failures!


The sandpaper was going to give me a nice, brightly coloured, easily rendered and interesting picture. What was I thinking?! What do you generally do when your first attempt fails? You try again of course, learning from your mistakes and doing it differently. You do not, however, do it three times in almost exactly the same way, expecting somehow that some miracle is going to happen whereby a skilfully rendered, beautiful flower will emerge.

There are probably folks out there who can work wonders with pencils and bog standard sandpaper - if they can avoid choking on the pencil dust, that is - unfortunately, they do not include yours truly! And the other failure on Fabriano 5? Well, the colours were all wrong and the background was.....well.......enough said.


Anyway, here is the Viola picture I am actually doing for this task. It's the one I started doing in the first place, before I decided I could do it much better on other papers. It's really not that bad - Oh, the irony!! This image represents step three of the exercise and I am planning to have it finished by either step four or five.



And finally....... here's a picture of a natty little wooden pencil holder which someone at my art group was kind enough to make for me. It holds 13 pencils, even the stumpy ones, which is about right for the number I generally use for a single picture. Thanks John!