Our Christmas Cactus

 

The new challenge of Artists&Illustrators Magazine is 'Plants & Flowers' and we are challenged to paint the plants on our window sill, the flowers in our gardens and if there is a bouquet of flowers on the table, to paint that.

At this moment there is no bouquet of flowers in my home and in my garden there are only some small daffodils and a Hellebore left. All other flowers are still thinking about showing themselves. Last year I have already painted the daffodils and the hellebore, so I thought to paint the Christmas cactus that lives in our home on the window sill.

This plant is a very old one and it belonged to my husband before we met. It does not grow very much anymore but most years there are some flowers at Christmas.

For this watercolour I have made my pencil drawing directly on my watercolour paper, without stretching it. Later I taped it to my board, to keep it in place while I was painting. I expected to work with just a little bit of water so I thought stretching was not needed for this one. I was right about that, I did not use a lot of water and the paper did not buckle at all. 

For the green segments of the plant I have layered mixes of green, composed with more blues, yellows and sometimes even a shade of red. Each segment has at least three layers of different green mixtures, to get the colours in the painting resembling those of the real plant as good as possible.

Painting this familiar plant was nice and I am happy with the results.

The information about the materials I have used, the size of the painting and its availability can all be found in my Tumblr blog.