Snapdragons Process

This one started with a long battle to try to grow snapdragons. Botanical Interests likes for you to work from life and when a variety is any kind of unusual (or when the timeline isn’t firm), they’ll send the seeds for you to grow it at home so you have the exact right plant to look at. Sounds great, right? Well, turns out snapdragons are really hard to grow from seed (they do fine reseeding themselves, but replicating that as a human is beyond me). I tried all spring last year, and got nowhere at all. I finally gave up and bought snapdragons of a similar size / type from Tagawa Gardens so I could look at them in person for structure, composition, and how the light hits them. Then I worked from Botanical Interests’ reference photos to make the colors accurate to the variety I hadn’t been able to grow in real life.

I sent the client several sketches to get buy-in on the composition. This is the point at which they picked the cup and I thought “What have I done!?”

I sketched the cup and some of the snapdragons I had on hand, but I knew I didn’t have enough of them in there.

I sketched multiple more stalks of snapdragon at different levels of maturity. The little arrows show the light direction in the reference photo so I could compile them all the same way and reference the lighting properly. But with each sketch on a separate piece of tracing paper, I could make the composition just how I wanted.

So here’s the final layout, after having traced all those various single stalks into one—and then trying to figure out what the heck to do with all their stems in the water!

At this point I send it to the client again for approval.

Finally, it’s transferred to watercolor paper. I did the transfer with watercolor pencil so I can melt the lines with water as I go. I started in on the painting of the cup and water (all watercolor so far here) because it was what I was most worried about screwing up. Eat the frog!

There is a bit of colored pencil down here as well but still mostly watercolor as I work out the general way the stems and leaves relate to each other and refract. I hate making things up as I paint, but I did a LOT of it here. Only a few of the stems were in the real cup I was painting from.

Here you can see clearly how I’m starting with watercolor (on the left) and adding colored pencil (on the right). The pinkish bloom in the lower right has SOME colored pencil down but a lot more to come. The ones in the center are more finished.

Tada! Lots of back and forth among the mediums later, here is where we arrived. The biggest thing was that at the end, I sent the painting to the client and learned that, since I was working from a different color of snapdragon, I actually had the green wrong—a bit too green. The real Night and Day Snapdragon’s leaves have a lot more red in them. So I’ve added that here to get it to be more accurate.