Draw Paint Letter: Spring Part 1
Garden pea alphabet, Victorian eggs, baby animals and more
PRINTABLES: GARDEN PEA ALPHABET
Our subject today is Pisum sativum, the garden pea, a humble green vine with a celebrity past.
Peas have been cultivated since before written history, grown in the shadows of the early Bronze Age, eaten as a staple food in neolithic Syria. They were harvested in the gardens of the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt. Thomas Jefferson loved peas and grew more than 30 cultivars in his vast kitchen gardens at Monticello.
Pea vines are beautiful, which makes them an ideal drawing subject. And they send out wonderful spiral tendrils, which makes them ideal for today’s project: a watercolor pea alphabet!
Think of today’s exercise as a way to playfully explore mixing shades of green and using your brush in different ways. Perfection is NOT the goal, and your pea alphabet may not resemble mine. That’s fine! (No botanical accuracy is needed, so we are going with brush strokes and not reference photos. Resist the urge to be too realistic.)
If you are new to watercolor, fill a page or two with practice strokes and swirls before working on a word.
If you are not sure of your drawing skills and you are eager to get painting, you can transfer the desired letters from our printable pdf page to your watercolor paper. Be sure to enlarge them on your copier -- I recommend drawing them around 2 inches tall for easier painting. Then cut out your letters, fill in the back side of the copy paper with a healthy coat of pencil graphite, and trace over the outlines to transfer them.
Of course, you may not want to draw the letters at all. For wild and whimsical vines, look at the Pea Alphabet pdf for inspiration and just start laying down your paint in the general twirly shapes of the letterforms.