You might wonder what this picture on the right is all about! A single blackberry stuck on a piece of  Blue-tac!

Botanical art takes time – at least when I do it. I always have to research my subject before I start and then take time. doing each element. But because one leaf might look similar to another, they are not and therefore you cannot use exactly the same method on each of them. The leaf might be facing in a different direction, be in light or shade, have a curl, a hole or different colour. The same is true of the blackberries on my branch.

Each blackberry is in a different stage of development from tight and green to soft and black. Additionally, each drupelet on a berry seems also to be in different stages of development and too can vary through green, yellow, pink, red and black-ish.

As you know our plants live, so how do you cope with the fact that they change constantly? Even what seems to be a dead leaf, changes as soon as you begin to paint it. I take loads of pictures of my plant in the original set-up.

I also take lots of of detailed photos from each element of that set-up. But I do not paint from photographs. I use these pictures to find and replace an element when it changes and dies. But to replace it with the right fruit to fit in my composition, I need a lot of photos depicting the original one.

The berry on the right is a replacement berry, laid on my desk in the same direction to the light source as the original specimen. Sometimes I use the original drawing of that element and just use the colourations and form from my new specimen, at other times I re-draw my new specimen and paint directly from that.

Once, when practicing for the Crab apple series in colour pencil, I drew the same arrangement three different times to put them in slightly different compositions. From afar one thought it was the same picture section, but when looking at them in detail, you could see that on every single one, all the apples and leaves were different.

Below I will create a slide-show of all the pictures taken up to the next blog. It would be helpful if you could let me know if you don’t want the pictures taken so frequently, but I know that it helps some people to see the gradual change in the picture and how I get there.

Next time, apart from showing the different stages, I will also show you the state of my art table!

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