SkunkyArt | MysticSparkleWings — Inktober/Drawtober Day 8: Orange Toad

Those flowers are more orange in person. Admittedly not as orange as I wanted them to be, but part of that is the lighting, part of that is the nature of alcohol inks combined with my impatience, and the final part is that anything other than my yellow-y orange in the orange-to-red-range of my alcohol inks scares me a little in how wild and overpowering they can be.

The background-background also plays a role there since putting even the most vibrant orange over green is going to get a little muddy.

That curl next to the toad/frog-ish shape is meant to be its tongue, fighting off those mentioned slugs and snails.

While the "obvious" thing to go for here was literally an orange toad, I wanted something a little less on-the-nose [as should be no surprise to Sparklers that know me and the magnets well], so I did some Googling and found out that the "Orange Toad Lily " is a real flower that exists, and I was also reminded that toads can eat other things that are usually considered pests to flowers like slugs and snails. (Though that does make me a little sad because I have a soft spot for both—They don't have stingers or bite usually, and they don't move fast enough to be threatening, so as far as bugs go, slugs and snails get a BIG pass from me.)

So the "orange princess" here is the orange flowers a toad would semi-unintentionally be protecting in a garden.

I also specifically looked up reminders of the differences between toads and frogs, which is not a long list, but since the prompt is "toad," and not "frog," I wanted to do my best to stay true to that.

The little figure on the left probably still came out more frog-like from my own ink-brush-skill limitations, but that I can live with.

However, the idea to sorta bring fairytales into this was technically more frog-inspired, àla "The Frog Prince" and similar, but I know toads also get fairytale mentions from time to time (mostly in older ones Disney hasn't yet touched), so in some sense, I guess you could say that's just another similarity the two creatures share.

I originally had the word "legends" up there instead of "gardens," but I changed it entirely because I would have had to make "legend" with the magnets, meanwhile "garden" was sitting right there, ready-to-go. But it does fit thematically, so my laziness may have actually made the whole poem stronger instead of weaker in this case.

The background probably would look a little better with more flowers, but again like with the orange color, I was too scared to add more because I was terrified I'd ruin what was turning out to be a pretty good thing.