Stardew Valley Flower Pot

Stardew Valley is a farming simulator video game developed by ConcernedApe, where you can go mining, harvest crops, and tend to animals on your grandfather's farm. One of my favorite parts of the game is all the animals you get to take care of, so I thought it would be fun to decorate a flower pot based off of the animals in the Stardew Valley game.

The pot was painted to look like the night sky in the title menu, with a green base representing the mountains. I drew up a few animals (attached in the FarmAnimalsTemplate pdf) to add onto the pot after its done being painted, or you can draw up/paint your own!

• Flower Pot (I used a 4.3" diameter clay pot)
• Dark Blue, cerulean, light green, dark green, and white paint (the exact colors of blue and green paint are shown in the photo) and optional gray paint
• Paint brushes
• Colored Pencils
• Paper
• Tape or glue
• Access to printing (optional)
• White Gel Pen (optional)
• Tape or laminator (optional)

Using Arteza Acrylic paints, I dropped a few globs of paint on the surface of the pot to start painting the sky. The top of the pot should have the darkest color paint (Prussian Blue), followed by Cerulean, a little bit of Phthalo Green, and then white paint. Sweep the brush back and forth in long strokes along the front of the pot, working your way downward to the white paint, and then back up again to achieve a gradient. Repeat this step for the other side of the pot. Make sure to paint the inside, if you want to!

This step is best done using a large brush. Mine was about a half an inch wide at the bristles. If you're using acrylics, you should probably work all the way around the pot at once instead of in two sections, because it can be tough to blend all of the paint where the two halves of the pot meet before it dries.

Using a small detail brush, start making fluffy white outlines of clouds around the pot, and fill in the clouds with a layer of white paint. I used an old brush that was a little frayed at the tip, and this made the process of painting the clouds easier. This process is shown in the first photo.

Next, make a second layer on the clouds using very light gray paint within the inside of the clouds. Don't paint all the way to the edges of the white cloud you have already painted, leave up to a 1/4" gap. It helps the effect to vary the size of the gap around the cloud, as shown in the second photo.

When this dries, add a third layer using white paint within the gray section. Again, don't cover up all of the gray section, leave a little bit of a gap where you can see the gray coming through. The goal is to make the clouds look fluffy. I found that for this last layer, it helped to use small globs of paint. Its okay if the paint sticks up off the surface, it will make the clouds look more 3D! This effect is shown in the 3rd photo.

Using pale green paint and Prussian Green, I painted the clay dish shown above. There's not much to this step, I did a plain green flat-wash using a blend of those colors, adding more paint as I needed it.

I drew up 5 Stardew Valley inspired animals for my flower pot and attached a PDF scan of my drawing at the beginning of the tutorial, so you can print it out and color the animals I drew! To make my flower pot exactly as advertised, I used a photocopy of my drawings on regular copy paper for my final product. I colored them to look like pretty standard barn animals, and cut out the drawings as closely as I could to the black lines. Feel free to be creative with coloring in the animals! Stardew Valley is filled with monsters and dinosaurs and even has blue chickens, so there's no requirement to be realistic!

I used packing tape to laminate the paper animals after I cut them out. This preserves the paper better and gives it more structure for taping or gluing. I cut the packing tape fairly close to the border of the animals, but it's best to leave some border around the paper for more protection. Since this is a flower pot, there's a chance they could get dirty or wet when watering the plants, so it's best to keep them protected! You can also use a laminator if you have one, but the packing tape was easy to use on such small drawings.

The last step is to complete your flower pot!

I used Scotch tape in a little double sided roll to attach the animals to the flower pot. I trimmed the tape to ensure it wasn't visible past the edge of the animal. Using a little tape roll worked well, because it made the animal stick off the pot, so it looked 3D. Plus, you can move the animals around! For a more permanent fix, you could definitely try glue, though I'm not sure which glue would work best with acrylic paint and laminated paper.

Lastly, I used a white gel pen to draw some small stars along the top of the pot, just like on the game's title screen.

Here's the finished product! I have a collection of succulents in my flower pot in the meantime, but I want to switch them out for jalapeño plants later on. It makes sense to grow some food in a farm-decorated flower pot!