2011 - 12" x 9" - Mixed Media (Acrylic Colored Ink, Watercolor), Arches Aquarelle watercolor paper
Hairy seed pods like this grow on the southern Magnolia tree. The Georgia Tech campus in Atlanta has many of these trees, and that’s where this Magnolia grandiflora fruit was seen. It has a visitor, which the Atlanta Audubon Society tells me is a leaf-footed bug known as Leptoglossus spp. This is a sucking bug that feeds on shoots, buds, and fruits of a variety of plants.
The tiny hairs on the fruit are sparkly and plentiful, so I mixed pearlescent inks with white (and a bit of black ink for grays) to help capture the shininess. Initially, I thought to use technical pens for drawing the hairs, but in the end, I just used a tiny brush. It worked well.
This painting was shown at the 2010 Holiday Exhibit of the Nature Artists’ Guild of the Morton Arboretum in Lisle, Illinois, November 12-14 in the Thornhill Education Center.