Purple Magnolia

I've been trying to draw a good magnolia for Sarah all year.  Finally, we spent a few hours looking through google images, and we came up with a photo of these flowers.  I was pretty intimidated by the whites and the double blossom - both new attempts for me.  I've been working on this for months.  It was such detailed work that I could only bear doing one or two petals at a time. 
The flower on the left has mostly colored pencils and pastels.  Half-way through this piece, Elizabeth introduced me to chalks, and I love how easy it is to shade and to fix mistakes with chalks.  The flower on the right is mostly color pencils for the basic colors and then chalks for shading.  The background is all chalks.  I also went over the flower on the left with some additional chalk-shading. 
This is probably my favorite of all the flowers I've done so far.  I like adding in the backgrounds.  I think I'll be working with chalks for a while to come.  It goes so much faster and makes the shading so much smoother.