Hi, everyone! This is Quinn from zquinns_art on Instagram. 

This month, I have something fun to share with you all. As you may know, I love plants. But I have a particular fondness for my houseplants. Last year I made houseplants a monthly theme, and since then, I have enjoyed doodling little houseplants wherever I go. They’re very easy to make since they are so forgiving if you mess up or it looks imperfect; plants are already so different and crazy that no one will notice one leaf being a bit funky. So I wanted to share my process with a few plant doodles with you all! It should be beginner-friendly and enjoyable for anyone with a love of plants! 

Supplies For House Plant Doodles

• Pencil or pen to sketch with
• Acrylographs: Any set with more than one green will work! The Plant Based Bride collection works best as it has three very leaf-green colors. 
• Archer&Olive notepad
• Plenty of references: you can use either your own houseplants or any pictures you find online.

Start with the Pots

When drawing houseplants, you have to remember the vessel that holds them. Sketching them first will help you decide how the leaves and vines and branches will move along the page. If you’re going to make multiple doodles on your page, I suggest changing up the sizes and shapes of the pots; maybe even add in a hanging pot here and there! The pots I show here all start off with a basic shape, the only difficult part is adding dimension to them. 

Now for the plants!

The first plants I doodled here are a pothos plant and a ZZ plant. Pothos vines are the most common houseplant, and as they are vines, I prefer to draw them in a hanging pot. They’re the most fun to draw when the vines are hanging down nice and low. My biggest suggestion for these plants, as well as every other one, is to make sure you vary the position of your plants. When you look at a plant, the leaves are not all facing perfectly towards you, so try some different positions. Show the sides and backs of the plant; show some leaves growing more vertically than horizontally, and so on. This helps your doodle to look a bit more natural. 

For the ZZ plant, I like to add the little teardrop shapes to either side. To add the different positions, I’ll just have a branch with leaves only on one side, or a branch with leaves that are smaller on one side than the other to show a sense of depth. 

The next two plants are a peace lily and a dumb cane. The peace lily is very simple as the leaves are just dark green sword shapes with a teardrop-shaped flower. The dumbcane is a bit more difficult. The stem is made from diagonal-shaped pieces with large leaves coming from off the side. This is always the most difficult for me to draw, so I definitely suggest looking at some references. 

The last two are a snake plant and an arrow plant. The snake plant is very easy to draw. You basically just draw large wavy spear shapes next to each other. The most difficult part comes in creating the stripes that go along the leaves. The arrowhead vine, however, is much more difficult. The nature of the plant is to have large leaves that cross over one another. My suggestion for this is to either just be careful in your shading or go over the drawing with a pen to make sure each leaf looks separate from the next. 

Putting them together

When putting a bunch of plants together for a spread, it’s important to create height variation in both the plants and the pots. It’s fun to have different pots of different heights next to each other. I like to put taller plants like the snake plant into taller pots. It makes for a fun challenge! 

You can also vary height by using hanging pots!

You should also try to vary the different plants you use and the colors you use to color them. The more shades of green or the more colors of pots you can use, the more realistic your doodle will be! 

I hope you found my tips helpful in your own doodling journey. I have a printable here with the plants I created on Procreate for this tutorial as well as each of the individual tutorials for making them. You can find the printable here: 

I also made a video showing my process of drawing the plants using the acrylographs! 

If you make these doodles or were inspired to make ones of your own, feel free to tag me or Archer&Olive so we can see what you create!!