RBGE Botanical Illustration Certificate: Unit 9 Reflection
Unit 9 required students to turn in our leaf progress for our final composition, however, I decided to take a step back and redo a tonal study of my composition to understand the light direction. I felt this was needed in order to render the leaves and buds well. Doing this felt like working backwards, but also benefited the harmony of my final composition.
I revisited colour matching, finished a rough tonal study and got a good chunk of the final flowers finished. Not only did this deepen my understanding of light direction, it also pushed me towards a massive improvement from my practice flower attempts to the final piece. I made note of how important tonal studies are to final compositions. Next time, I will not rush ahead to the ‘fun part’ painting!
Here I also implemented a tip from award winning botanical artist, Billy Showell. She states when painting wet on wet techniques, it doesn’t really matter how many layers of water is used initially so long as you have enough that the paper glistens with a thin layer of water before adding colour. In my practice, I noticed doing this carefully renders the best smooth colour wash results. After methodically practicing this step sometimes with several water washes at a time ensuring the paper ‘glistened’ and dry brushing details at the end something clicked.. like magic! I finally was able to achieve the results I was after!
Not everything went to plan.. for example the petals on the flower with the arched stem, I by mistake painted slightly outside the lines and rushed to fix it. I lifted some of the paint off using a magic eraser and eased back in some highlights and cleaned up the edges. I’m not too happy with how heavy handed it is and I’d have liked more highlights left on that flower, but the one in the middle is perfection. It has that pop off the page ‘glow’ I always strive to get in my finished pieces. Between brush strokes, mistakes and small wins, is where the learning all slotted into place. I fell back in love with painting, the process and reignited my passion to continue deepening my love of watercolour botanicals.
