Dina Climatiano

Today’s obvious offering is a water lily.

It’s not the prettiest water lily, but I feel like water lilies are a little like pizza – even a bad water lily is still a water lily, and thus inherently beautiful, and a nice calming thing to look at. And if this ain’t enough for you, my lovely assistant Freia is here to bamboozle you with her cuteness.

The less obvious offering is my thought process.

I haven’t really picked up colored pencils in years, and to be perfectly honest, I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t even know why I have these in the first place…

Without much thinking I looked up a reference photo and started drawing. I’ll explore why I’m not that comfortable doing anything anymore without a reference some other day, but for now let’s focus on drawing from observation.

I didn’t have a plan other than place the main elements in light rough shapes on the paper, just so I don’t lose my sense of scale in the tiny details. I started filling in the contours of the petals and the fiery middle, trying to convey light and dark with pink shading.

Then I figured out that the water lily’s shape wasn’t defined so much by its own contour, but rather outlined by its surroundings, even if it is just other parts of the water lily that are more in the background. I really wish I’d thought of that before, though I’m not sure how to execute that idea.

From then onward it was a study of color. Or rather… What representation of color would convey what I observe the most, since I only have 12 colors at my disposal and they don’t really blend. I’m OK with that. Most art is a representation of reality, not a copy of it.

As far as the contour and shape go, this is unmistakably a water lily. I think for most of us contour kind of beats color in terms of how recognizable an image is.

I have a feeling that there are things that beat contour, but I do not have the training or the words to describe what these are, or the skill to demonstrate what I mean consistently. I just know that the people in Picasso’s cubist portraits are somehow recognizable despite being deconstructed into rough geometric shapes. Nowadays there’s probably a filter or something that turns your selfie into a cubist portrait…

Were portraits the OG instagram filter? Yes, I believe they were.

I wonder how much one can strip a real thing or concept into its bare elements and still have it be recognizable as the thing itself. That had to be an art movement, right?

Anyway, by the time I finished the leaf, Thor decided to start dropping things off the dresser (you know, as cats do) and I kept losing focus and growing tired. You can tell by the way the background kind of fills with black, like the representation of the inside of a closet that I wanted to lock Thor in. Worry not, I did not lock him in a closet. I just took my frustration out on the paper.

Have a lovely weekend everyone! I hope y’all go out and observe something pretty.