A few years back I used virtuals a lot to plan ahead with my trees. I even made this guide for the club website.

By far the best use is to assist with pot selection. It’s even more fun when it’s not your tree 🙂 As a regular user of online bonsai Forums, I like to do the odd virtual. Today Dave on the European Bonsai Forum was asking about pot options for his lovely Blackthorn. Must acquire one of these soon. This is the original Image.

 I took out the clutter with Photoshop before I started to play with pots.

It was an interesting task to find a suitable pot for this tree. It’s slanting style was going to be hard to get a convincing match. I don’t claim to be good at picking pots for trees, and this process of creating virtuals is a great way to push myself to find what works.

My first thoughts were to put it on a slab or shell. These were my first virtuals.

I liked these but wanted to give Dave a few other ones to help decide what works and what doesn’t. Next, I tried a Rectangle.

and a coloured glaze.

and a Walsall Ceramic oval.

Not a great option either. My next selections were drums. I quite like this first one.

For the last one I opted to change the potting angle by 15 degrees to a more upright position as a different option.

Hopefully Dave found it useful. As usual, I’m not sure I found a good match either. I’d love to hear what pot you would suggest.