Summer Cacti!

One of my best friends is the Cactus Whisperer. Her name is Diana, and I absolutely adore her. We've been friends since high school and are now majoring in the same major. She and I love cacti--they're so cute! I love how they are often quite tiny and fragile, so they have such delicate yet harmful spikes to protect themselves (I could make a comment about the symbolism of being vulnerable yet slightly prickly...but I'm not. Well, I just did. So sue me.).

Diana has this perfectly round cactus that stays a rich grass-green, and flowers every year. A delicate ring of bright magenta flowers settle on the crown. I myself have a small cactus that is supposed to have one large pink flower on the top. I've had it since I was five, and it has flowered exactly once. I swear, Diana is magic. Her cactus loves her more than mine loves me.

I have other stories about our love for cacti: Going to a flower shop on Valentine's day to check out their prickly succulents and completely ignoring all the roses, check; another time, popping in to see if a flower shop in Chinatown has any cacti and leaving with promises to call the owner for flowers for our weddings when we get married, check. These things just happen, right?

But onto the art. This is an art blog, after all (you wouldn't know with all the jabbering I do on it, though). I broke out the watercolors earlier this summer on a particularly warm day. The paints kept drying out within minutes! I experimented with a few different cacti styles, and then decided to use two of my favorites to make a card design.

(Excuse the small size of the next few pictures. I stole them from my instagram)

This photo has a filter on it, so it's been washed out a bit. But you can see that I fiddled around with formatting and finally got it to fit neat and tidy on a card! The background is my study notes for the OAT I'm studying for at the moment (it's killer, but I keep reminding myself, at least you're not studying for the MCAT! Haha).

And finally, here is the computerized, fixed up version with the real colors and details. I think it's just so adorable!

July 2015