As Maya Angelou said her grandmother always told her, “You don’t always get what you pay for, but you always pay for what you get.” As a believer in Karma and Maya Angelou’s grandma, I was a little nervous about stealing my neighbor’s roses.
But that neighbor moved away a year ago and her roses were producing those first magnificent blooms of the year. I just couldn’t resist cutting a few to sketch. I drew them with my Micron Pigma .01 and then added watercolor. I wasn’t happy with the results so experimented with adding white lines with a new white gel pen, a “Y&C Gel Extreme .07” which I like it a lot. I liked the sketch (above) better too.
I decided to sketch them again and used my Micron Pigma with a lot of cross-hatching to try to understand their form in a more sculptural way.
Then I added watercolor and made a big mess. I couldn’t capture the delicate coloring from white to yellow with red edges of one of the roses . So I tried adding gouache. Yuck, worse mess. I washed off the paint and tried again. More mess, and this time I lost a lot of the black lines. So I got out a Sharpie fine point and went over the black lines with darker ones. More gouache, yuck, some white pen, gave up.
Then I took a bunch of photos of the roses, thinking I’d start an oil painting and keep a photo reference in case the painting took longer than they lived. Pretty soon I was coughing and sneezing and my eyes were watering. These roses were very fragrant and I was allergic to them (unlike the ones in my garden that I selected for their lack of scent). I put them outside and gave up. I guess I paid for what I got!
Jana Bouc, Artist 