 You may remember a piece that I used in my 2019 YouTube intro video. If you've been around here long, there was that little snippet of the yellow roses. It never got done until today. The prospect of continuing with this drawing was daunting in the first place because I had no idea what colors that I had used, a zero clue. I also have a different style now than I had back in 2019. I mean, everything's different. I have a different pencil sharpener. Like I'm going to be using my long point pencils for this. So I sharpened all the colors that I had picked out. This pencil sharpener gives them that long point. It looks like it's eating the pencil, but it's actually just making that long point. It's eating the wood. It's not shaving off of that pencil tip. So I've got them all set aside in a cup so that I continue with the same colors. I knew this was going to take me a long time to do. And it ended up taking about five days of working 12 to 14 hours a day on it. That's crazy. I know it's ridiculous, but that's one of the reasons why I hadn't worked on it in all this time because I knew how much longer it was going to take. And the only way I was going to get to pieces like this was going to be to adapt my YouTube schedule. So thank you for being tolerant of me changing the way that I'm doing my YouTube. So it's going to give me space to do projects like this because I have the time to give to it. And fortunately, this was something I had a little extra time because I was on sabbatical and could really dive into this one and really work on it. The style that you could see between the old and the new is those two flowers. The left flower is what both flowers looked like when I got back to this drawing. The right has some of my pencil work in it. And there were some areas where I already had some work done, like these leaves in the earlier portion of the drawing were very graphical this way. It's not how I would draw them right now. That's just not the way I would do it, but I decided to follow along with that and add some other things to it like cast shadows. There's a lesson in the recent convincing shadows class that I just launched, I think it was two months ago, about cast shadows and the power that they have in a drawing to convince somebody that you know what you're doing, because even though I don't have the reference for these leaves and for this bud and for these roses, I'm imagining where those roses might be dropping a shadow onto the bud. And I'm making the shadow go up and down with the surface of that bud so that it follows along with that contour of the shape. And even though I have no idea if that's right, I have no idea if that's the way it should be. It starts to fool your eye into thinking that it works. Now the most difficult part of this entire thing was by far that background. That took me the most time, partially because I was trying to match color. And that alone was impossible. I could not find a combination that worked the same as the colors that I had started out with in the earlier part of the drawing. It was just not going to ever match with just one pencil. So it was apparently a couple of pencils. So here you can see I have a couple of yellow greens in some areas that I'm coloring with right now. I had other colors that were more of a blue-green color. And in that upper right corner, you can see more of that bluish. And then down in here, I used a blue there. It was a blue violet, but it looked when it mixed with the green like it has some reddishness in it. So it was almost a brown color. What I opted to do was just let all those colors move back and forth between each other because I couldn't make one consistent color for the whole thing. Since I didn't know where I'd started, I had no idea where I was headed. So I will be adding some bokeh to the background so that I can make it look like I intended to do all of that. So there you go. But you'll notice that the colors that I'm using here are similar to the ones that I used in Monday's video. If you saw that one, it was all about bokeh backgrounds. And I used a lot of golds and purples together in watercolor, in Copic, in colored pencils, so that I ended up getting some neutrals. When you're shading yellows, you can use oranges to make some of those shadings. You can use some of the browns. But boy, does purple add a richness that nothing else can add, whether you're going with really pale, soft kind of purples or really rich, deep, bluish ones, play around with which ones start to push the image back further and which ones pull it forward. Because there's different points in here where I let the rose have more life to it because I added more of a pinkish purple versus a bluish purple. But you don't know that until you try it. So keep a scrap sheet with you and try out the colors and see how they're going to work together because any combination of colors is going to act differently. As I worked through the rose, I ended up leaving less and less of the white on the edges of the rose petals because I really liked it better that way. The second flower, I'm not going to color here. It is on the patron extended video. So if you'd like to become a patron, there is a link in the doobly-do. You can see the longer video. And I will be putting extended cuts of my Friday videos on Patreon. So you can always go see those if you become one. All right, next up, I'm forming my kneaded eraser into a tool that I can use. And you can stretch these, squish them, pull them, twist them, do all kinds of things to them. And they are self-cleaning, basically. I wanted it nice and soft so that I could make some bokeh eraser backgrounds. And I took a piece of glassine and punched some circles out of it so I could create some bokeh circles and just use that as a mask. Normally, I use the glassine paper under my hand when I'm working on a piece like this so that I don't end up smooshing the pencil with my hand or get any of the oils from my skin onto the surface of the paper. And then using a stick eraser is another way to try to get more of the small details or to refine some of the edges of the circle because this circle mask that I made was not perfect. It was helpful, but it wasn't going to give me real sharp edges all the time, so some of those I refined with the stick eraser. I just added some real pale stuff in the background. And that is my dusting brush that has become my friend as I've been working on more and more pencil work. The dusting brush helped to keep my surface clean of all that excess pencil powder. And I've also used the mask to create some negative drawing in a bokeh fashion. So I'm drawing around the shapes so I can make the shapes behind darker instead of making them all lighter. So you can work both directions with having a little mask like that on hand. I am super tickled with this drawing and not just to say, hey, it's a great drawing, but because I can see my journey in it. I know where the pieces of 2019 me are and where the remnants have been taken over by new me and my new style. And it's really interesting to see that journey and you may not notice it, but I know exactly where that is. If you love these roses as much as I do, you could own the original at sandielknockfinart.com while it's still there. Society Six has prints of this. And if you wanna see the extended version with that second rose, everything else that was cut out of this video for YouTube purposes, it's for patrons. And on Monday, I did three different ways to do Boca in color pencil, watercolor and Copic. During the week, I did other things on social media only. So on my blog today, you're gonna get links to all of those things. I'll tell you what they were, which sites they were on. So you don't have to follow everywhere. On Fridays, you can just catch up on everything you might have missed because I was experimenting with Boca and having way too much fun. Thank you so much for visiting. Thank you for smashing the like button and I will see you again on Monday. Take care.