I have wanted to draw a plant for a while as I love botanical illustrations and plants in general. A few years ago I tried one or two plant based drawings and could never get the colour to look right underneath the pencil so I had been putting off drawing another one ever since.
Where I was going wrong is that I was trying to get the colour to match the exact colour of the real plant instead of finding a colour that works best with my illustration. I chose to illustrate a Croton plant for two reasons. One reason being that I thought that the patterns on the leaves would be really interesting and challenging to draw and the other reason being that they are normally quite brightly coloured. If I could find a way of colouring this plant that works with my illustration style then adding colour to future plant illustrations should work too.
This illustration took several times longer than I expected it to but I feel like that’s the case with most of my drawings recently as my work is gradually becoming more detailed. Although I am not quite sure what I am going to use this drawing for at the moment I have learnt a lot from it and will feel more confident drawing plants in the future.
