Widdle bitty babies…

This was such a fun piece. I really enjoyed the interplay between the mediums, so I thought I’d share a little bit of that process stuff with you here.

In most areas, I was doing a layer or two of watercolor to get a lot of color down quickly across a solid area (like each pot) and then a whole lot of colored pencil to tune in both the darks and lights. Only about 4 million pencils :P But I did arrive at a few favorites for each of the plants and a finite palette for the rocks. Once I got a lot of their local colors established, I did some very light washes of watercolor over the rocks in shadow to tone them down overall.

An unexpectedly enjoyable part was actually the ceramic of the bonsai pot. I love how it came out and it was so easy to get the slightly stripy texture with colored pencils.

Last was popping solid white stuff out on each plant. For the cactuses, I bought a new brush that was thinner (and longer!) than anything I had before for the solid white spines, which are done with gouache. I toned it down with a tiny bit of raw sienna for the “shadow side” spines. And of course any spines that cross into white are done in pencil—a cactus illustrator trick that doesn’t seem like it should work but really does. You use a slightly thicker/darker pencil on the shadow side, and the lightest/hardest one you have for the bright side.

I used bright white gouache for some aspects of the flowers and glossiest highlights of the non-spiky succulent too. You can lightly tone it with colored pencil afterwards, but you have to be careful—too much pressure can chip the gouache straight back off. Womp womp. So mostly I have the gouache as the top-most layer.

I tried a hundred things to get the brightness of the pink cactus flowers while also trying to avoid my most fugitive neon pinks. In the end, the best thing was aggressively lifting out color in the lightest areas with a bit of water, which gave them a little bit of the sparkly sheen they have in real life.

Fun fact: as soon as I finished painting, all of the flowers fell off! It was like they were holding still for their portrait and then were like ANNNNND CUT!

Which one’s your favorite?