Colorful Cactus Gardens

In keeping with our nature        journal drawing project, we created these beautiful mixed media cactus gardens planted in Mexican or native American inspired decorative pots. 

We had fun observing different types of small cacti to consider for our gardens, as well as various native American patterns for our pots as we planned our compositions. 

You'll need: 

a sheet of watercolor paper,      reference photos of cacti, a drawing pencil, fine and ultra fine black Sharpies, a watercolor board, masking tape, watercolors, and a few watercolor brushes of various sizes.

 

We started by sketching in our compositions lightly with pencil. We didn't put in every detail at this point; all we needed was to know what goes where and establish which cacti are in back and which are in front.  We also added a few lines in the pot patterns spikes in the cacti, just a few to show what they will look like.

Now the entire sketch is traced with your Sharpies, which will not run or blur when it gets wet. This is important for the next step. Be sure to add all of the details left out of the original sketch. 

Now you should have something that looks like a coloring book page for grownups! 

Tape your painting to a watercolor board (to keep it from wrinkling). You will fill in the background with two analogous colors (best to use liquid watercolors if your painting is larger than 9"x12"). We blended one color into the other from top to bottom, such as yellow to orange or blue to violet using a wet-on-wet technique. 

Then, once the background has dried (we used a blow dryer) you'll begin mixing various shades and tones of green for your cacti. Paint them in, and then fill in the rest of your painting as desired. After the paint is dry, you can go over some of your ink lines again if they don't seem dark enough.

NOTES: Creating this little cactus garden helps young students plan a composition, gain confidence with ink (Sharpies), blend a background using two or more analogous colors, use Native American-inspired patterns in artwork, and plan a color harmonious scheme. It is also a great way to encourage using the watercolor palette wells for mixing watercolors instead of simply painting with the colors directly out of the pans. We mixed a variety of greens to paint the various types of cacti after observing from photos how different each shade or tone of green actually was.  See more cactus garden ideas from our earlier posts here and here.