May Day!

It's the first of May, and my pocket calendar spread is full of roses. Hmmm...it will be some time before roses bloom here. Heck, the first bulbs of spring are barely blooming. But no matter, it should be an easy page to color in, right? We'll go for red and yellow roses. But my red pencil showed very pink when lightly applied, and still fairly pink even as I applied more pressure.  That would be the big one on the right and left. Hmmm again. In the bottom right corner I tried blending it with blue with not much luck. Moved to the bottom center one and tried mixing violet. Oooo - a lovely color but not rich dark red. I gave up and gave in to the limitations of my red pencil and enjoyed the lovely pinks it was giving me. The yellow roses got tinged with a bit of orange.

So roses . . . we all know what a blooming rose looks like, right? But right away I realized I do NOT know what a bloom looks like for sure. Are the petals darker on the front than on the back like a leaf? I thought to ask this as I darkened the turned over edges of a petal. Well, if not, too bad. I liked what was happening here. I also thought perhaps I should go back over the large light areas for more solid coverage, but then remember some close-up photos I'd taken of a rose long ago, and how I had marveled at the network of tiny veins running through the petals. My light touch with the colored pencil left a surface that looked much like those veins, so it stayed just that way.

Happy first day of May. Wherever you are, I hope you find a few blooms somewhere to celebrate the shaking off of winter.