April Showers Bring May Flowers

In April, I was pretty busy with my "day job" and also preparing for a couple of Botangle classes that I wanted to have a new spring templates ready for my students to use. So while it was snowing in the Rocky Mountains, I was sketching daffodils in the hopes that by doing so I could coax spring our way. So far it's still been pretty cool and wet (good news for a great wildflower season) but things are slow to bloom up here.

So enjoy this May flower now just really taking off (so late). I am posting a series of steps on how to create this Botangle so you can see how I started and ended with the final colored piece. This was done on 120-lb Arches watercolor paper. I used graphite shading under watercolor and went on top with colored pencils and white charcoal (as well as my favorite white highlighter, the Zenstone from Zentangle. It allows for more subtle whites than the white charcoal.

Now it's May and I've spent the entire weekend adding a "birdwatcher" garden for the high country in our backyard. I can't wait for those new plants to flourish and bloom, giving me much more inspiration for future Botangles!

My finished Botangle daffodils, 5.5x5.5 inches.

I began with this basic contour drawing.

Next I added shading with graphite. Here you can see that I already started adding Zentangle patterns on the stems.

More pattern work.

At this point I decided I liked keeping the inside bell of the daffodils and a few leaves "untangled" for compositional balance and interst.

Close up of the final.