15 May 2026

Stop pressing so hard. Draw a poppy.

 

Creativity comes in many forms. Even for the same artist. Take me. I love coloured pencils. Within an hour or two of first using them I felt like I'd found my medium. This was it. And it rekindled a love for drawing I had as a child.

 

Coloured pencils are often marketed as a slow medium. We hear this a lot. It's layering and blending and softness. Yes. But it doesn't need to be. There are (or should be) no rules in art. Being creative should be the one area where we can just have a play. That said, there are tips we can learn from each other if we want to achieve certain effects.

 

Personally, I can spend 30 hours drawing a cat (albeit not continuously). Or three months drawing a woodland. With all the love and admiration in the world for botanical artists, I cannot find that same enthusiasm for flowers. 

 

No wait! Hear me out.

 

I don't have a gentle touch by nature. But I can with practice. And one thing that's recently helped my layering is the delicate petals of a poppy.

 

If you, like me, have ever felt like you're digging a hole in the paper to correct the mistakes of hard pressure in those earlier layers, this week's demo is for you.

Build Your Skills

 

The principle: Control comes from restraint, not force. Most of us press too hard from the start, leaving nowhere to go. A poppy teaches you to start impossibly soft and let the paper tell you when you're ready to push harder.

 

What you'll need: Hard graphite pencil (2H or 4H), coloured pencils that blend well (professional-grade work better - loving Derwent Lightfast at the moment), good quality paper with tooth (Legion Stonehenge or similar), and patience (or a willingness to try to be!).

 

You're marking rough shapes (think how a four-year-old would see it), barely visible on the paper. 

 

This creates texture and tells the paper fibres which way to lay. Everything radiates like spokes from the central disc. 

 

Your first few layers should be almost invisible. Barely touching the paper. Only increase pressure when a new layer makes almost no difference — that's your signal you're ready to push harder. (This is how you avoid digging holes.)

 

Don't finish with one colour. Build gradually by cycling back through: more scarlet, more white, more magenta. Between layers, white blends and moves loose pigment.

 

Don't touch that dark centre while you're layering the petals — you'll drag dark colour around and muddy everything. Work on petals first. Add the centre (ochre + green, with a dark violet surround) as your final move. Keeps everything clean.

 

Bonus — the brave bit: Use complementary green in your darkest shadows to intensify the reds without muddying. Test on scrap paper first.

 

Full demo below, filmed in real time. If you'd like the ref photo (and/or optional line art, I've popped them at the end of the email). 

Corner Shelf

I've been sketching in my field notebook a lot lately, and these two pens have become my go-to combination.

 

The Derwent Line Marker (0.1 nib) in Graphite gives me a soft line without the smudge. It feels like a faded pencil sketch.

 

For subjects where I want more definition — or I've practiced so much I can draw them with my eyes closed — I'll use a Sakura Pigma Micron pen for hard outlines. The permanence of ink means I can go over it with colour (I even tried a watercolour wash). 

 

With both pens I have two stages: hard graphite first with light pressure (rough form), then pen (detailed structure). No pressure. No mess. 

 

If you're tired of smudged pencil marks or worried about erasing, try this approach on anything — not just poppies. Goes back to my first point. We can love coloured pencils, but dabble with other media too!