This time I finished off the enlarged flower spike of the Liriope muscari picture and started on one of the immature spikes in natural size. The tuft of leaves and immature flower spikes are done in this way to show the growth habit of the plant.

I chose to do the flower spike enlarged as the individual flowers were quite small, therefore to appreciate their beauty I felt it was better to do these on a larger scale. In actual fact they are only twice natural size, although when you see them against the immature spikes, they seem to be more than this.

In botanical art one needs to try and give as much information about the plant as possible, without repetition. There is always so much that defines an individual plant, that a picture can just get complicated if the information in it is repeated too frequently. This is often a mistake I have made. But in this instance, because the flower spike is enlarged the number of petals, stamens and stigmas can be seen clearly in relation to the size of the the whole spike.

The next section of the picture I found very difficult. The largest immature flower spike measures 5 cm therefore, because I was painting this natural size, the individual buds were tiny. Because there is some tooth on the Strathmore 500 Bristol vellum paper, I found this got in the way of painting tiny detail. So I used a piece of agate to try and burnish the surface of the paper in between layers of paint.

For all the flowers I used a magnifying glass to see the detail I was painting and to check that my edges were as clean as possible. As I don’t normally use a magnifying glass constantly, I got a nice kink in my neck!