Art prompt: herbs

For today’s art prompt I chose basil and garlic. They both lend themselves nicely to stippling in pen and ink, a favourite technique and medium, plus I wanted to try something new (new to me anyway) and felt two illustrations would be better than one. Stippling is time consuming and requires a lot of patience, but it can also be meditative and rewarding to see the image come to life. I like the meticulousness of stippling, but I didn’t want to spend days making thousands of little specks; so with the pieces below I decided to go light on the stippling and add some colour with watercolour to see if it would work. I found that by laying down the stippling first it acted as a restraint to stop me overworking the darker tones in watercolour. I quite like the resulting illustrations and, in fact, these took less time using the two mediums than I would normally spend on just stippling in ink or painting in watercolour.