How to Draw a Pansy in Colored Pencils

With only five large, distinctive petals and many color variations and patterns, pansies are some of the easiest and most satisfying flowers to draw. Beginners can get good results with a pansy on the first try. If you're feeling ambitious, add a recognizable pansy leaf next to the stem!

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Colored pencils set (can be 24 color Col-Erase set or any)
• Drawing paper or sketchbook
• Berol Col-Erase colored pencils, Violet and Green
• 4B or softer pencil, or Ebony pencil (soft black pencil)
• Kneaded eraser
• Workable matte fixative
• Photo reference, live pansy or printout of my drawings.

1. 
   Value drawing in soft pencil of a purple and yellow pansy

   Choose a photo reference from a gardening book, seed packet, magazine or the "Artist's Photo Reference: Flowers" that I use so often for floral references, linked in Resources. Or simply read the article and copy my drawings, a pansy is so simple it's possible to work just from sketches. If you have pansies in your garden, pick one and put it next to you in a bud vase, that's the best way to draw any flower.
   
   Gather your supplies and start by using the soft pencil to sketch a value drawing of the pansy. Pay attention to the shape of the petals, the size of the petals and which way they overlap. The largest is the center petal on the bottom. Two side petals overlap in front of it. Two petals a little larger than they are overlap one way or the other behind those three. Like the upper and lower wings on a butterfly, getting these shapes overlapped right is very important to make a pansy recognizable.
   
   Mine has two purple top petals edged in yellow with a very narrow line, plus the bottom three petals are yellow and purple with spiky red-violet marks at the center, a big band of yellow and then a big band of purple before a very narrow light edge. To make the light edge show well would take a dark background, but we can skip that by outlining it.
   
   Draw it with the soft pencil paying attention to all the lights and darks, so that you remember where they are. Spray your penciled value sketch with workable matte fixative. If the markings and colors on your flower are different, do the value sketch accurate to your flower.

2. 
   Outline drawing in Col-Erase Violet and Green

   Berol Col-erase colored pencils are inexpensive and erasable. Sketching for the colored version of the pansy with related colors of Col-erase will let you erase mistakes, but the sketch lines will vanish under similar colors when we get to shading the pansy. There may be other brands of erasable colored pencils on the market, but this author has never seen them or heard of them. You can do the entire project in Col-erase if you like, as they are decent student grade colored pencils.
   
   Col-Erase have about the hardness of an HB (normal No. 2) pencil. They come in 24 colors and can be found at most art supply stores and many office supply stores as they are also useful for charts. Colors match Prismacolor Premier, Prismacolor Art Stix and Prismacolor Verithin colored pencils exactly, but other brands have similar colors.
   
   Sharpen the Violet and Green pencils. Using Violet, outline the five petals of the pansy and put in the little curving shape in the center. Using Green, outline the stem and leaf.

3. 
   Leaf and stems shaded green, yellow areas drawn heavily

   If you have Prismacolors or other softer colored pencils, switch to those for filling in. Col-Erase do not give strong color without doing many tonal layers, because they are the consistency of regular pencils they're better for sketching than filling in. If not, just go over solid areas multiple times until they are good and smooth.
   
   Using golden yellow, sketch a little in the center inside that tiny purple curve. Skip a little area of white and start adding the yellow bands on the three lower leaves, following your sketch and the photo reference or real flower. Draw in the fine golden yellow lines around the outside edge of all the petals.
   
   Shade the stems, going harder on the right hand line and where it turns horizontal, the lower line. Shade the upper part of the stem without pressing as hard, creating a soft tonal layer. Shade the leaf as shown, drawing around the veins and leaving them white for now. Let the veins and central rib fade off before quite reaching the edges of the leaf, they are not that prominent in the photo.
   
   Pull light strokes outward toward the edges at the angle of the veins from the central rib to fill the area, or inward from the outside edge to meet them. Short light strokes without pressing hard will do best for this kind of shading, also if areas are lighter or darker go over them again rather than pressing harder. Try to delicately work the vein outlines inward to narrow them and smooth the shape of the leaf's central rib.

4. 
   Red-purple shading on the flower, light green/yellow green shading on stems and leaf

   Using red-violet, fill in the small red-violet areas between the yellow center and the yellow band on the lower three petals. Draw softly and go over it twice if your tonal layer isn't dark enough, do not draw very hard on this part. Make strokes start at the center and flow out toward the yellow, overlapping a little but going very light when they do. Leave some individual yellow strokes sticking into the red violet patch and some red-violet strokes going deeper into the yellow.
   
   Then go around the edges of all the petals doing short flicking strokes that overlap side by side. Start them at the edges and lift the pencil as you flick, then go right next to it and do another one partly on it so that it shades smoothly but a little irregularly inward over half the area that will be filled with purple. Shade the same way on the top two petals but only a bit over a quarter of the way in from the edges since those will be entirely filled with some form of purple.
   
   Again, go over it twice if your first efforts are too light or not smooth enough, but do not press heavily with the red-violet the way we did with the yellow. Pull all outer strokes from the edges of the yellow edge toward the center, trying to keep the starting points together to form a neat clean edge at the edge of the yellow band. Go slow and careful on this part, if necessary draw a soft red-violet outline inside the yellow line so that your flicking strokes start within it.
   
   If the red-violet goes over the line or slops out of the pansy completely, try lifting it with the kneaded eraser. Press it down hard on the mark you want to remove, then peel up. Stretch and fold the kneaded eraser and repeat. Do not rub with the kneaded eraser or that will drive the color into the paper in a way that makes it harder to remove and ugly.
   
   Shade lightly over the stems with yellow green. Fill in the reserved white veins on the leaf with yellow green, (Spring Green, Apple Green, a lighter green that's yellower). Light Green if you use Col-Erase. Shade over the surface of the leaf with the light yellow green after doing the veins in it.

5. 
   Violet added to the petals, and used to deep-shadow the leaf and stems.

   Using Violet, fill the remaining purple areas, the bulk of the two upper petals and the white bands between the yellow and the red-violet. For filling in bands of color that fade on both sides, practice a sort of rocking or zig zag motion with a somewhat blunt pencil. Press hardest at the center, come up again at the end, go light at the start going the other way, back and forth swinging your hand in a shallow arc that hits the page in the middle. This takes some practice but produces a nicer texture than just pressing hard and zigzagging, and it's easier to avoid heavy strokes that go off course into the wrong area.
   
   Flick very hard strokes starting at the center through the red-violet area into the yellow, separating them and making them distinct. Aim into the centers of red-violet strokes that went deep into the yellow. Hard at the center, lift as you pull them outward. Do not cross the yellow area with them but go into it if you want to.
   
   Color over the violet area two or three times till it's full strength, always radiating strokes out from the center or in from the edges and overlapping them side to side. Don't grind so hard that it would have a shiny surface yet, this still needs a burnishing layer and maybe some shadows into the dark violet top petals.
   
   Run a light line of violet along the right side of the stem, over the darkest green part but not quite at the edge. Flick some light violet lines along the underside of the ribs where the leaf's darkest, and some light curving strokes all around the edges. It doesn't read as violet, it just reads as darker green and jazzes up the leaf.

6. 
   Completed pansy drawing

   Burnish the red-violet parts of the petals again with red-violet or magenta, going over about that far again into the purple on the two large petals. Using the darkest blue, shade in from the center a little way up into the two darkest petals and add a couple of details into the lower petals' violet area, not too much. Burnish over the blue with the violet again, to get the color smooth. Don't do anything to the center.
   
   Burnish over the leaf with a medium green, darker than the yellow-green and lighter than Green.
   
   Sign and spray with workable matte fixative. Drawing a pansy is a good starter project, and it can be done in many different colors. Try different combinations of colors and shade them into each other to match your own flowers, and try different greens for the leaves. Pansies are good decorative designs for crafts items as well as fine art and floral illustrations. They make good scrapbooking motifs and can be used anywhere an easy floral design would cheer up your projects. They come in many colors and combinations, so enjoy the entire box of your colored pencils coming up with different types of pansy designs.

Tips & Warnings

• Violas are a lot like pansies but may only have one color. The difference is unimportant when drawing them, just draw the flower as it is and pay attention to shading if any of the petals are shadowed by others.
• Check Dick Blick for brands of colored pencils and look for artist grade colored pencils. They will be more lightfast generally, and much softer with more pigment. They will also have better coverage because of that. Some of these effects are harder to do with student grade or scholastic colored pencils because they have harder leads and less pigment, though those are good for deliberate thin tonal layers. If your colored pencils are listed as "scholastic" just accept that you need to add more layers with them to get full coverage and be patient, also think of getting a colorless blender to help burnish and enrich them.
• Use workable fixative in a well ventilated area or outdoors, the fumes can be dangerous. Do not under any circumstances smoke, or light an open flame until the smell of the fumes is gone.
• Do not erase with the pink eraser on the end of Col-Erase colored pencils. It will stain the paper just the way childhood Pink Pearl erasers did. Use a kneaded eraser or white vinyl eraser to clean off Col-Erase lines completely.

Resources

• Dick Blick for information on colored pencil brands and Col-Erase, or purchase online
• Amazon link for "Artist's Photo Reference: Flowers" by Gary Greene

[robertsloan2]

on 10/18/2007 Thank you! That's a great idea. That way the images in the printouts are handy, ready to scale up and transfer too.

[jennhollowell]

on 10/18/2007 I'm tempted to print out each of your how-to's because they're teaching me so much!