When Two Leaves Became a Stained Glass Window: Painting My Variegated Pothos in Watercolour

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There's a particular kind of pothos leaf that I cannot get enough of. The pink-and-green variegated kind, the one that looks like someone took a paintbrush to an ordinary houseplant and decided to be a little extravagant about it. 

I came across a photograph of two of these variegated leaves, and something about the way they overlapped, the way the pink streaked through the green almost at random just got me so excited. So I simplified it down to a line drawing and let go of trying to be botanically accurate, then gave myself permission to reimagine it as a painting rather than a copy. What came out the other side was something closer to a stained glass window than a botanical study, and that became the whole direction for the piece.

Following the Variegation, Then Pulling It Further

The real leaves were doing a pink and green conversation, and I wanted to honour that as the foundation of my palette. But two colours, even a striking two, can flatten out fast on paper. So I brought in warm golds and yellows to sit between the pink and the green, doing the work of bridging the two and giving the piece more dimension than the original photograph ever had. It's a good reminder that you don't have to be faithful to a reference to be inspired by it. Simplify what you see, then let your own colour instincts take it somewhere new.

For this palette, I worked with five Daniel Smith watercolours: Quinacridone Gold, Jaune Brillant No. 1, Sleeping Beauty Turquoise Genuine, Quinacridone Pink, and Cobalt Green Deep.

What I love about this particular five is the contrast built right into the pigments themselves. Quinacridone Gold and Quinacridone Pink are both smooth, transparent, staining colours, they blend into each other like silk, with no texture to speak of. Sleeping Beauty Turquoise Genuine is the opposite story entirely. It's a genuine mineral pigment, so it granulates, breaking up and settling unevenly into the texture of the paper rather than sitting flat. Cobalt Green Deep granulates more gently, bridging the gap between the smooth colours and the turquoise, while Jaune Brillant No. 1 stays soft and a little opaque, calming things down wherever the rest of the palette gets too saturated. That mix of textures is doing a lot of the storytelling before I've even picked up a brush.

A Project for When You're Stuck

If you tend to overthink your colour choices the way I sometimes do, a project built this way is a genuinely good reset. You choose your palette before you start, you commit to letting the water and the paper make a lot of the decisions, and there's no wrong move once the brush actually touches down. It's the kind of painting I come back to whenever I need to find my rhythm again or simply remind myself what a colour relationship can do without my overthinking it.

Painted in collaboration with KUM

This piece, and the paint along that came with it, was created in collaboration with KUM Art Materials, my favourite brush brand. For this painting I used a KUM Memory Point Brush - Round Size 4.

If you paint along with this one, I'd love to see your finished work. Share your work and tag me on Instagram, @heysweet.art - I read every single tag, and I love seeing how differently the same reference and tempalte turn out in everyone's hands.