Toothpick Painting - Cherry Blossom Bonsai

This is the first in a series of bonsai trees. It's kind of apropos, since bonsais are tiny trees and I'm painting in tiny dots... ok, it's a reach, whatever.
It's painted on some cool handmade 6"x8" paper that I found in my "art stuff" hoard collection - and it took about 15 hours. A lot of people ask how many dots there are, and I always respond that I am WAY too easily distractable to count that high.
However, this time I did manage to count the dots in the soil (the black dots between the green of the pot and the brown trunk). Drumroll.......
There are 841 black dots for the soil alone. Seriously. Well, give or take five. It doesn't look like there are that many but I was really concentrating to make sure I got it right. So the entire tree must be in the tens of thousands.

I also experimented with a smaller implement - a 3/4" wall nail in order to make the dots smaller. I know they're tiny already, but it would be awesome to make them so small as to be undetectable from a distance.
But, it didn't turn out the way I wanted. The result was "slashy" and inconsistent. So, back to sharpening toothpicks. :sweat_smile:

Now that it's finished, I'm so sick of seeing reds and pinks that the next tree is going to be green, I think.