For my future mother-in-law’s birthday this year, I wanted to give her a memento that would suit the colors of her newly decorated home office. For a pink-and-white theme, of course I’ll choose cherry blossoms!
There were many, many iterations of composition before I landed on one that felt right. My fiancé helped break me out of a compositional rut when he suggested I incorporate a “secondary subject.” Brilliant! The in-laws’ house entered the scene and remedied my composition woes while adding a bonus memento factor to the piece.
Somehow I realized further into preliminary sketches that it had been a very long time since I’d drawn cherry blossoms. There was a lot of trial-and-error as I tested line weights and illustrative styles with different inking tools. Eventually I gravitated toward the trusty dip pen with Manga G-pen nib; I return to this pen constantly with floral illustrations. It’s just so good! It deserves its fame.
I spent much more time on the base sketch of this piece than I normally do for an illustration. I think doing so helped immensely to handle the complexity of the composition so I didn’t get lost during inking. I’ll likely lean more on the underlying sketches in the future because of this—and because I can sketch away from my desk without worrying about making a mess.
While I began with the plan to color this fully in Tombow water-based brush markers, the project gradually became mixed-media as I practiced more with the palette. I seemingly can never resist adding gold acrylic ink to a floral illustration.
In retrospect this was a fairly ambitious subject for me, but I’m fairly happy with the end result. 🙂
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