How do you fix a ruined painting or drawing? What do you do when you can’t get more layers on your colored pencil drawing?

The first thing you need to do when something goes horribly wrong in your art is to stop, take a break, come back and identify exactly what it is you don’t like about where it currently is. To just keep “working on it” with no plan for what to fix or change is to keep getting frustrated and to keep failing.

In my case, I needed to do three specific things.

  1. Make the background darker. In this piece, the white fur around the bee was not showing up enough because the background wasn’t dark enough to create the needed contrast.
  2. Rework the ENTIRE flower. Those spikes specifically need to be defined, especially the bases so that they aren’t just a bunch of random lines.
  3. Put in the time needed to create the details on the bee.