 Hello, and welcome to my YouTube channel. My name is Sandy Olnok. I'm an artist. I work in a lot of different mediums, and I work in a lot of different sizes from large frameable pieces to small things that you can tuck in an envelope, to sketchbook drawings, all sorts of things you'll find on this channel. Whatever kind of artwork and size that you create, you are welcome here. Today, I'm gonna be drawing something that was inspired by the new emojis that Apple released. They have a new hyacinth, so I had to go buy myself a hyacinth. I hope you can smell this, because it is wonderful. It smells like spring around my studio, but I wanted to draw this one because I thought it would be good practice to get myself toward one day being able to draw in real nice detail a lilac, which is my other favorite spring flower. And I really struggle with those because they have very tiny flowers, but this has an inflorescence, which is a lot of blooms, a lot of little flowerettes off of one stem, but they're large enough that I could actually draw them individually. That's what I'll be doing today. I'll show you how I've done that, how you can apply that to drawing any kind of a flower with an inflorescence. And at the end of the video, you'll see how I made this into a small card as well. Let's get started. While you can work from a photograph to do a drawing like this, I would recommend going to your local garden shop and picking up whatever flower it is you want to draw because you can turn it, you can twist it around, you can light it the way that you want to be able to see what you need to. I put mine against a white background, just some white cardstock, and then I turn a light on and I try to adjust the light so it's going to show me the shapes that I need to see. So I have drawn this thing out already in pencil. And yes, I know that pencil can lift when you're using alcohol markers on top of it. But if you take a kneaded eraser before you start doing the alcohol marker drawing, roll it up like a hot dog, long shape, and then roll it over the drawing over and over again. It will lighten the graphite and it will loosen up anything that's on the surface and lift it off so your markers won't pick it up. It'll still trap it underneath, but it'll make it lighter so that you won't see it and you can adjust that with your markers. So what I'm going to do is tackle each flower separately, one by one, it's a long process, and with this particular Hyacinth flower, the centers are the dark part and I could see that really clearly when I looked at the plant itself. There are photographs out there where you can't see that necessarily as completely or maybe they're different breeds, but this particular one I wanted to color like this one that I got at my garden store. And you could take this same drawing and adapt the flowers just a little bit or change the colors to make them other kinds of Hyacinth. As long as the flowers are similar to this, there is a grape Hyacinth that is more like little balls, like little grapes, and that would not work with this drawing, but you could easily draw that kind of grape Hyacinth yourself. Maybe I'll do that on social media this week. So for each one of these, I made my darker parts in the center. I tried to add a little bit of pink to it because I wasn't liking the color that much, but then I decided I'm gonna just save that color adaptation for a little bit later in the drawing and began on some of the negative spaces. And when you're looking at something like this, you can really see where the places are in between the flowers. When it's a flat photo, there's oftentimes you can't really tell where one thing starts and another ends, but when you've got the flower right in front of you, you can turn your head, you can tilt it and look at it at a different angle. You can change your lighting so you can see what's that dark space underneath and what's another flower petal underneath. And each one of those little flowerettes or florets I should say, each one can be handled and colored individually or you can do them as a group. Here I'm just gonna do a whole bunch of these with a light blue violet and then start putting the colors down. And some of these don't look like a flower shape, like a flower like that first one that I colored because on the one that I had that I bought, there's only a few of them facing fully front that look like an actual flower. A lot of them you just see part of the flower. So I was trying to pay attention to that. I started trying to shift my hues and I tried a darker pink. That didn't work so much. So I went over it with a little bit of blue violet and I tried a lighter pink and I realized what was gonna happen here if I wasn't careful was that I would make some subtle adjustments at this stage and start pushing it to the pink. And then I would end up not remembering how much of each of those flowers had gotten how much pink on it. And then the whole thing wouldn't match. So I decided to just work my way through with the blue violet colors in order to create this flower in the first place like the whole thing. And then adjust all of the values and hues all at once at the end. And that way I can match all these blue violets because I knew I wanted this blue tint underneath of everything. And then when I add that more warm purple color that I think I was looking for, I could do that all at once at the end. And when you're doing something that has this many small flowers, it's really easy to get your values off from one side of the flower to the other because you're treating each flower individually, each floret individually. And it's really easy to start putting in, you know, like when you're doing a recipe and you put a little more salt in one thing and you put a little more sugar in another thing. And eventually they don't end up matching. You can't get all the cups of whatever it is you're mixing to the same mixture because they're not all being done together in sequence. So proceeding here, a pace with all of the little florets. And while I'm doing this, I just wanted to say thank you all for your wonderful response to my tulip videos last week. I was just delighted to see how many people wanted to try, especially the color pencil tulips. So I look forward to continuing to see your work, keep tagging me on social media and posting over at ArtVenture if you would like because I really enjoy seeing that you're excited about art and learning and growing. And even during Easter weekend, people were making art and that makes me happy. So with all of the flores that I'm doing here, I'm looking regularly at the value. You'll see me kind of go back and add a little bit of darkness in between some of the flowers here and there. And that's because as I start squinting at the whole drawing, I'm looking at the whole inflorescence and saying, well, you know, I got a little darker down here. I didn't get enough dark up there. And it doesn't have to be equal. I'm not looking for an equal amount of dark. I'm looking for an equal intensity in the darks. Wherever the really true darks are supposed to be, I want that darkness to be consistent across the drawing. And it doesn't have to be in the same amount in every place, but consistent across the drawing. So here's where I finished all of that initial coloring and I made a big shift in the hue and the value. And I switched over, we'll slow it down here, to a V15 and a V17. And this is gonna allow me to pull all of this stuff together. You can see how much there's kind of that weird pale purple and a dark purple that are all blue violet types of colors. And now I can go in with this war reddish purple. It's a more warm color. And start to go over all these areas. It still shows that blue violet underneath, but I can leave all those edges that I, you know, I told you before that my flower that I bought has the darker parts in the center of the flower, both in the center of each petal as well as down into the middle of the flower. And then it has lighter tips on the edges. So when I started putting all of this warmer red, or reddish purple in there, I started going into the middle areas. And then when I go into the very dark areas with the V17, which is another reddish purple, but it's gonna be darker, I can start working on building up more of the contrast. And I know a lot of you are probably looking at this going, that's more contrast than I normally get anyway. Well, I like to push it because the more contrast you get, the more real things look. In real life, you see things because they have shadows and highlights. And if something doesn't have shadows and highlight, it looks really flat. And you hardly notice it at all because there's no contrast. So I wanted light edges next to dark shadows. Whenever the plant is that you're coloring, you also need to study the leaves and look at the textures that are on them. What are the shapes of the leaves themselves? And these are just kind of long spiky leaves with a rounded point on the end. Some of them curl inward. They're more like a cup shape, but these were mostly flat and they had just a rounded tip on them. Little bit of softness to the edges so they get a little bit fatter in some parts, but they have a definite texture to them. So I started with a light yellow green, started adding in a medium green to add that texture and all those veins in them. And then started moving into the leaves and the stem that were in the center. Those are gonna be darker because they're shaded by the flower itself. So the interior leaves are often going to be darker, but you also need to pay attention to whether or not they actually are darker because if the stem happens to be a really pale color, it's gonna look lighter than the leaves. So look very carefully at what you are trying to draw. And next, I'm gonna harmonize colors a little bit. I like to pull a color from one area into another and I started by putting in some of the purples into the shadow areas and then going over the purples with greens in the green areas, in the stem areas. And then I use some of the greens to go into the shadows in the flower itself. That starts pulling them together so they both reflect off each other. And if you end up with too much color in one area, too much purple ends up in your green, then do like the Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and just add some more peanut butter into your chocolate or chocolate into your peanut butter to go over purples with greens to dull them down. Now for the bulb itself, mine is a potted hyacinth, so I didn't really feel like torturing the poor plant. I kill plants anyway. That's something I'm not good at is growing things and I didn't wanna take it out so I could look at the bulb. So I Googled a bulb and roots so I could finish the drawing without torturing my hyacinth. And I found one that had the outside was mostly a purplish brown color and I liked the fact that it was purplish because that reflected the purples that were already in my drawing and then I was only adding a little bit of brown to it to make the bulb itself. But it had this peeled off area on the outside so there was some interior skin. They're almost like onions with a whole bunch of layers and stuff. And playing around with creating that shape was really fun as well as just layering like crazy with all of the purples and the browns. You could even use some greens in there in order to pull the harmony from one side of the drawing to another area and just keep using those colors. And I did half of the bulb at a time so sometimes if you want to experiment with colors start with a portion of that particular section and here starting with a part of the bulb to see what kinds of colors worked and then the second half will go much faster because you're not doing as much experimenting. You know how much purple you can get away with and I knew I could get away with a lot of purple because I ended up using a lot more purple as I went on with the first half and then could just continue to add more color in the second half. And you could, like I said, mix in some greens in there mix in whatever other colors you have in the drawing because the more you can pull those colors from one area to another the more natural it's gonna feel. The bulb that I had chosen as a reference had some kind of straggly bits hanging off of them and I played around with how much of them I really wanted to show in the drawing and how much I just kind of made the bulb a little bit bigger to incorporate those so that they wouldn't look like he was kind of a hairy bulb because that's kind of what it started looking like poor little bulby guy. But I loved the purple in this. I just thought that was really beautiful and complimented the whole drawing really well. So after this came the roots again I wasn't gonna torture my poor hyacinth and dig it out of its little pot. I'm gonna leave it there and let it be growing as long as it will continue to survive. And then added roots that I found in a picture on Google they are mostly whitish brownish kind of roots for this particular kind whatever the roots were for this particular kind of bulb but if you have a particular breed a particular type of say hyacinth look at the tag that you get from the garden shop like what kind of flower is it and then Google what the roots look like for that flower because if you're trying to be really accurate there are so many references. When I was young I just never ended up having as many references as I wanted. I used to collect books on animals and flowers and trees and things because I wanted to have a myriad of references. I wish we had the internet when I was younger it would have been so much easier and I wouldn't have been buying books and hauling books around with me from one part of the country to the other. So use the Googles that's what the Google is there for and just created all these kind of fun scrubby roots in a couple of the same light colors and brown colors that I used in the bulb itself. And then I ended up actually even adding in a little of the blue violets as well just again to pull that color through and let it harmonize with what's already in the roots all the brown colors that are there it just brings a unity to the whole piece. So as I was drawing this and it was just gonna be a demonstration drawing like this for anybody who wanted to go draw your own hyacinth but I realized there's probably a lot more people who might wanna draw a hyacinth but all those florets they can be a little intimidating. So guess what I have done for you? I took my little hyacinth and I drew a printable that you can purchase and download and it's an image that's nice and big you can print it the same size as I did my large drawing or you can shrink it down, you can make cards with it you can use just part of it and color just the flowers, whatever you'd like it comes with both a light version so a light gray line as well as a nice black line version and you can print either one. Now this is the size of the image compared to my head so you can see just how big it is it's a lot easier to get all that detail in when you're working large. However, this one is printed from the digital image that I mentioned and that one I used the no line version the lines are lighter and that means they kind of disappear so you can see that the similarities between the two can be accomplished whichever one you might try to do I encourage you to see the link in the doobly-do to go pick up the hyacinth image and I will see you again on Saturday for a rather hilarious video you're not gonna wanna miss I will see you then take care and go create something every day.