Pitcher Plants: My Entry for the Weekly Doodle Contest Week #1

Pitcher plants were completely new to me when I moved to Atlanta, Georgia a little over 10 years ago. I love plants and gardens, so one of our first activities when we arrived was to visit the Atlanta Botanical Gardens. They have an entire marshland full of different kinds of pitcher plants - which, by the way, are carnivorous plants! They look sweet and unassuming, but they can digest mice, bats, insects…anything that has the misfortune of climbing inside their attractive liquid filled pitcher.

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Final Doodle - This was so much fun!

Thank you to Hive account@coloringiship for organizing this great contest and for introducing me to doodling as an art form and not just as something people do in boring meetings ;-) I found this exercise to be relaxing, meditative, and highly satisfying.

I may not have done all the steps like in the tutorial our contest leader provided, but I figured out a way that worked for me.

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Photo credit: Pamela Seeley Sorrels
Heliamphora, Marsh Pitcher, Venezuelan Pitcher Plant

This is the photo I used as a model for my drawing. I can copy, but I couldn’t have pulled this image out of my head. You can see I mostly followed it, but made a few shape adjustments to fit my personal aesthetic with more curviness.

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Getting started is the hardest part! Where to begin? Where’s my eraser? I used Canson Mixed Media paper and a regular old pencil.

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Coming along rather nicely! I was wracking my brain to come up with seven different doodle patterns. Whose idea was it to draw seven plants?!?

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Now for the tracing. I could never in a million years have pulled this off freehand with a pen! I used a Micron 05 Pigma pen for tracing. Then I went back and erased all the pencil markings. I should probably find a lighter writing pencil - those exist, right? In the doodles I did after this, I only sketched the outlines with a pencil and it was a lot easier to freehand the pattern inside. That seems promising :-)

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BONUS: My 5yo son drew this and I thought it had potential as a doodle. He’s a born artist! I love having a hobby we can do together that doesn’t involve me running!