Exhibition Preparation

Preparation for exhibitions and shows

Foraging plants in the norwegian mountains – 16. Small cranberry Pt.2

| Gaynor's Flora
The marshy area where the small cranberry was found.

Planning the artwork

Digital callipers shown in an earlier blog. I use gloves so that fat from my hand is not transferred to the vellum, making it more difficult for pigment to adhere to the surface.

I began sketching the Vaccinium oxycoccus subsp. microcarpum (Small cranberry) in August 2018. The measurements of the tiny details were done using my trusty and accurate digital callipers.

Everything about the plant is tiny – except for the fruit, which is about the same size as a bilberry 5-8 mm.

When I first saw the plant and fruit meandering through the top of the moss, I couldn’t believe that such a slender plant could actually bear the weight of its fruit. As it happens, it doesn’t as everywhere I looked the fruit was either lying on top of the moss or supported by other structures in the marsh. The stems are so tender they are smaller than a blade of grass.

As with each of the other pictures I chose which sketches I would utilise from my sketchbook and arranged them with the help of the computer. I made continual adjustments to all of the plans so that visually they would appear as one exhibit. 

Can you see some of the parts sketched in the final artwork?

Digital plan of the composition. It is nearly the same as the final piece of work.

Each picture in the series was to hang ranged according to habitat from boggy and wet to sandy and dry.

The small cranberry was intended to start off the boggy end. But as the series has taken so long in the making, the criteria for exhibition has changed and I am allowed no more than six pictures.

Unfortunately, although completed, this picture will not be in the exhibit at the Saatchi gallery in June this year, but is still part of this series and will be treated as such in these blogs. I intend to show you all seven of the completed pictures after the judging process.

As with most of the pictures I did small trials on unmounted vellum to make sure I was choosing the right colours.

If you have read all the blogs about this series so far, you will have seen the finished trial piece in section 7, the last part of the history of the project.

The next photo is of that trial piece being worked on. I painted it twice natural size, the same as on the final artwork; you can see the flower sprig used as my model, lying on the vellum. Perhaps now you will have a better understanding of how tiny the species is.

Trial piece on vellum – in progress.

The colours I used: 

  • Quin Magenta PV122
  • Quin red PR209
  • Perylene violet PV29
  • Quin Gold PO49 (I don’t think single pigment can still be obtained)
  • Winsor Blue Green PB15.
  • Lemon Yellow PY175

Most of the trial pieces were painted at the cottage we rented, where I could easily source my subjects. I took over the dining table, with windows and light coming from the left. The family had to accept eating meals either outside or from a low coffee table. I was happy though!

My ‘studio table’ in the mountain cottage.

One of the biggest challenges with this plant was the root system. I remember a comment a judge once made about a botanical art piece; where the roots were likened to something having been put under the tap!

The Cranberry roots lie in very boggy wet areas and the hair-like system seems to fall away from the main stem lying along the upper layer of moss. The hair-like roots do plunge vertically down giving the appearance of having been under a tap! The Cloudberry coming from a similar environment and often intertwined, is not like this.

During the annual stay at the cottage in the mountains, in addition to my sketchbook and painting materials I had also cut a piece of Perspex to the exact size of my vellum block. I used this to try out samples of my subject to see how they would flow naturally across the picture.

Here you see a thread-like piece of small cranberry plant together with a couple of line drawings from my sketchbook; one drawing is the enlarged section in the trial piece and the other is actual size.

Compare this both with the compositional plan above and the final artwork. The more ways one can look at composition whilst planning a picture, the better will be the result.

I started sketching the small cranberry in August 2018, started work on the final artwork July 2021 and except for scalebars, finished in January 2022. 

The native range of this species is Subarctic to Temp. Northern Hemisphere. It is a subshrub and grows primarily in the temperate biome. This includes Great Britain and Norway.

Kew – Plants of the World Online

Fruit of the Forest liqueur

From Randi and Arne Christian Halseth, Skoppum (thank you)

  • 500 ml Bilberry
  • 50 ml Bog bilberry
  • 150 ml Mountain Crowberry
  • 100 ml Lignonberry
  • 700ml 60% spirit
  • 500 ml sugar.
  1. Put well-ripened berries into a suitable glass and sprinkle with sugar. The berries don’t need to be meticulously cleaned of leaves and tiny stalks. 
  2. Top up with the alcohol. Shake well then refrigerate. 
  3. Turn the jars as often as possible for 4 – 6 weeks.
  4. Strain and pour into bottles. 
  5. Age for a few weeks.
  6. Enjoy

I will start the detail about the Bog bilberry plant in my next blog 14 May 2023

Foraging plants in the norwegian mountains – 15. Small cranberry Pt.1

| Gaynor's Flora
How rich in different flora a boggy marsh area can be!

When looking for an image suitable for highlighting the small cranberry I came across this one. You can see from the covering of sphagnum moss that this is a boggy area, and although few nutrients has a very rich flora. In fact this photo was taken in the area from which I found several of my chosen species to paint.

This picture was taken in July 2019. The new small cranberry flowers are out but I also found some shrivelled berries from the previous year. You can see clearly both the flowers and the tiny leaves all attached by a very thin stem meandering through the moss. The bog bilberry leaves have a lovely red edge at this time of year and the cloudberry plants show either the red sepals of the male plant or the immature fruit. In this instance the plant we see is obviously male. The mountain crowberry also does well in the same environment.

Vaccinium oxycoccus subsp. microcarpum 

Vaccinium oxycoccus subsp. microcarpum a tiny insignificant looking plant – but an even more exciting find.

In norwegian the plant is called Tranebær, which directly translated means Crane-berry – or as we call it in English – Cranberry. 

Firstly, why Crane-berry? This is a picture of the flower and perhaps you will get a better understanding of why. 

In the USA Cranberries are farmed in huge bogs and this is a significant industry. But the cranberry is slightly different to the one I have painted and is called Vaccinium oxycoccus subsp. macrocarpum. The difference between the two species is that subspecies microcarpum is very tiny and grows wild in the mountains, whereas the subspecies macrocarpum has a much larger berry and leaves. It is generally a larger plant altogether.

As a comparison I thought it might be interesting to show some of my photos from when I was in teaching botanical art in the USA in 2016. My husband and I visited a Cranberry farm south of Boston. It was intriguing, and I learnt quite a bit about the fruit and what happened to it. Note the size of the North American species of farmed berries at 9-14 mm against the small wild cranberry at 5-8 mm.

One of the questions regularly asked at the farm was why the fruit floats. The plants grow in bogs in America and when the fruit is ripe and the area flooded, the plants are shaken mechanically, releasing the loose fruit. The fruit each have four ovaries which are also air pockets, making the berries float to the surface of the water where they are collected. The small cranberry has a similar construction.

We weren’t actually looking for the wild small cranberry when we found it. We were in a very boggy area and tracing roots of a Cloudberrry plant when we found a small, obviously preceding year’s, fruit. We noticed that running through the Sphagnum moss was a tracery of fine hair-like stems with the tiniest of leaves. We started following this until we found a flower. I had no idea what it was so had to find out. 

In 2017 when we first found the plant, I had no idea how widespread it was or if it was a fruit that people foraged for. Since then I found out that very few seem to know of its existence and it is rarely picked to make jams etc – possibly because it is so small. Since then I also noticed I didn’t see either flower or fruit reliably every year. Sometimes we were unable to find any at all, although hunting in areas we had seen it previously. 2021 was just like this perhaps due to the lack of rain for the previous eight months.

In two of the pictures above you can see the previous year’s berry. It was these that alerted us to the plant and we went on to find the flowers.

It is a very boggy area but you can see some of the other plants in the series including bog bilberry flowers and leaves and the Mountain Crowberry. The other plants there in addition to the Sphagnum moss are heather, Andromeda polifolia or Bog rosemary, Vaccinium uliginosum (Bog bilberry), and Empetrum nigrum subsp. hermaphroditum (Mountain Crowberry). 

I painted the Bog Rosemary before I moved back to Norway and this is now in the Chelsea Physic Garden collection. The Bog bilberry and Crowberry are included in this series.

Although the wild small cranberry is not well known, it is certainly a plant with edible fruit and sometimes we found quite a few. It was amazing to see the marsh dotted with small bright red fruit, making it worthwhile to pick for a dessert or decorate a Norwegian cream cake. Uhmm!

The 2nd part about the Small cranberry will be posted 11th May 2023.

Foraging plants in the norwegian mountains – 14. Cloudberry part 2

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Ready to be captured on vellum. Connections are important!
Using graphite and watercolour wash. Maleplant in the autumn.

Rubus chamaemorus – Cloudberry -Multe

Planning the artwork.

The piece of mounted vellum I had ready was 25 x 31 cm and I had seven mounted blocks all the same size. Finished, they needed to look like one series of pictures, but the Cloudberry was a plant so unlike the other ones. The element that linked was the habitat. As an example, I only found the Vaccinium microcarpum when following the rhizomes of the Cloudberry because the roots were completely intertwined.

Once I felt I had all the information I needed for each subject, I scanned the sections and manipulated them with editing software on my computer. I then compared them so that I knew each picture had similar information. The Cloudberry was the only one that was Dioecious. The series was about the fruit, so it was these that were prioritised, although I did include pictures of the flowers. 

Because each cloudberry plant was either male or female and had male or female flowers, I needed to show the differences. The male flower is generally slightly larger than the female and the centre of the flower is completely different. 

The male flower. Stamens in a ring at the base of the sepals. the centre is concave.
The female flower. A ring of false, white stamens around the centre with several pistils arising from the centre.

Both male and female flowers have the same number of sepals and petals, but the male flower has a ring of stamens round the base of the petals, with the very centre dipped and smooth. The female flower displays the gynoecium (female reproductive organs) with a ring of white, false stamens round the base of the petals. 

Male plant June 2017
Female plant July 2021

From a distance and once you know what to look for, it is easy to tell the difference between a lot of male or female plants.

This sketch page shows more cloudberry sketches (with additional ones from the small cranberry). You will find both the deep red male plant and the sketches of the small cranberry in their respective final pieces of artwork.

In 2018 when these sketches were done, the summer had been hot and tough for the plants. The Cloudberries ripened very early and by the time we arrived they were long gone. All that remained were some dry leaves and soggy berry remnants. But the sun had really worked well on leaves in the open, changing them from lush green to orange and fiery reds.

More sketches including the two berries we were given in 2018.

Once I had decided which elements were important for the picture, I did line drawings and moved them around digitally until I felt reasonably satisfied with the arrangement. Of course, in some instances adjustments were necessary and easily done on the computer. The line drawing composition above was almost the last one I made whilst well into the artwork.

In my final artwork I used several sketches as a basis. The sketches are used as a template whilst painting from an actual plant. Having the plant in front of me for the final artwork, enables me to paint its portrait as I see it, getting its botanical detail right at the same time as conveying texture and three-dimensionality. These are all things not easy to do from a photo.

I traced the whole composition to get the placing correct on my mounted vellum block, then each element was traced onto separate pieces of paper.

The vellum needed protection as I worked, and I used one of the old tracings that I had no use for, plus a clear acrylic sheet. All surfaces against the vellum are completely clean.  

Getting the overall composition placed correctly
Tracing over the section I will start with.
Protecting the vellum block.

Once the image is traced over to the vellum I lifted off much of the loose graphite from the transfer process. I generally start with a pale wash, allowing this to dry completely, then remove the remaining graphite. I continue painting with a dry technique being sure to lay this very lightly.  

Sketching was started in June 2014, the final artwork on vellum started July 2022 and finished in August 2022 except for the scalebars. 

Cloudberries are a circumpolar boreal plant, occurring naturally throughout the Northern Hemisphere including the UK and Norway, although there is little fruit produced in the UK.

Source: Kew – Plants of the World online

Cloudberry cream recipe

This recipe for ‘Mountain Gold’ is served on very special occasions including Christmas. It is served with cakes/biscuits often made in the period leading up to Christmas. Many of the recipes include almonds .

500ml whipping cream 
2 ss sugar
2 ts vanilla sugar (see recipe at end)
300ml Cloudberries

  1. Whip the cream together with the sugar until light and fluffy. 
  2. Stir in Cloudberries and sprinkle with vanilla sugar to taste.
  3. Place in the fridge until serving.

Serving:
Extra Cloudberries, Shortcake Biscuits

(from https://www.detsoteliv.no)

Vanilla sugar (vanilje sukker)

2 Vanilla beans

300gm sugar

  1. Split the vanilla beans in half lengthwise and scrape out the seeds. 
  2. Put the seeds into a blender with the sugar. 
  3. Blend with the blades until the sugar has become completely fine-grained and well mixed. 
  4. Put it into a glass with a lid and add to recipes as needed. 

The next blog post about the Small cranberry will be on the 7th May 2023.

Foraging plants in the norwegian mountains – 13. Cloudberry part 1

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Rubus chamaemorus – Cloudberry -Multe

In Norway, Rubus chamaemorus is often referred to as ‘Mountain Gold’ because it doesn’t grow everywhere, it isn’t always easy to find and in some years is quite sparse. It is a delicacy and the one fruit that people would like to find and pick. If anyone finds an area which has a lot of ripe fruit, they normally keep it to themselves for fear of others picking the spot clean. Up until 2003 it was forbidden to pick the unripe fruit; this was changed as it was difficult to enforce. But in northern Norway where it has economic importance, the landowner can forbid picking.

Cloudberry  is considered to be an endangered species (red-listed), it has a long, up to 10 metres, creeping rhizomatous root system and enjoys life best in sphagnum moss bogs. The species is dioecious with each plant either male or female. Although one generally sees the Male plant flowering every year, sometimes the female flowers are very sparse. But in the two last years, there has been a lot, relatively speaking, and if you know where to look!

Unripe, a Cloudberry is red, but as it ripens it becomes gold and it has a very distinctive flavour. Cloudberry is in the same family as Blackberries, so you will know that each drupelet has pips; once accustomed to the taste, one doesn’t mind the pips.

  • Male Cloudberry flower with ring of stamens.
  • Open pink sepals with stamens remaining on male cloudberry flower.

My friends who lent me their cottage when I started the series, pointed out that there were lots of Cloudberry plants round the cottage, but they had never seen any fruit. I had a quick look at the flowers (the two photos) and was able to tell them that they only had male plants in the patch. But only a few metres away there were loads of female plants busily flowering and developing fruit. They were unaware that Cloudberries had distinct male and female plants, so I showed them how to tell the difference.

Obviously, the distinction between male and female plants was one of the things that I needed to show clearly in my final artwork. But in the meantime, I needed to do as many sketches as possible and of course take accurate measurements. In my pleasure at starting properly in 2017, I straightaway forgot the necessities and didn’t take measurements of my dissections. Unbeknown to me I wouldn’t be able to catch up for another five years in 2022! Luckily, this was the only plant where I seemed to chase my tail year after year.

The page of sketches, is a ‘Cloudberry’ poster showing a collection of drawings from my sketchbook.

I was particularly pleased with the plant sketch showing both leaves and very unripe fruit. But, apart from this initial sketch I didn’t see either unripe or ripe fruit until 2018 when I was given two fruit by passing pickers.

I did the trial on the vellum (at the top of the page) in 2021 when I at last found fruit to take back to the cottage. But I still needed flower measurements.

Cloudberry poster put together from several sketch pages.

The pictures below show the area in which we found quite a lot of fruit in 2022.

Actually we were very surprised because we hadn’t had any rain since early autumn 2021 and all the lakes and reservoirs were pretty low. As you can see to the right, the moss was quite burnt on the surface, although there was still water deeper down. The area in which we were able to walk without getting too wet was much larger than the previous year. Global warming!!

The second part about the Cloudberry will be posted 4th May 2023.

Foraging plants in the norwegian mountains – 12. My working practice

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Bearded Iris in graphite
Accidents happen

In my last blog I showed you how careful I generally am to cover my artwork as I go along. But in this case I had finished the piece and had it propped up by my computer to scan and print it.

Unfortunately I ran out of pigment in the printer and needed to refill. Once this was done, I sat at the computer to check everything on the screen, looked up and saw this magenta splash across the artwork. I was shocked. How many hours had I used to no avail?

Be careful to keep artwork safe!

In my previous blog I wrote in general terms about the materials I use, including colour. My sketchbook contains notes of the colours used in the sketches, but these are only a guide for the final artwork.

The sketched colours are on white paper and the final artwork is on a warm vellum which can affect the overlaid transparent paint. If possible I try to match up the colours I used in the sketches if I don’t have enough live material to work from. For example, the leaves often change colour over a growing season and if I’m unlucky I might be painting young leaves in the autumn. This happened with the Bilberry leaves.

I try to limit the number of pigments I use in a picture but still have favourites that appear in most paintings. 

Watercolours used to paint the Small cranberry picture.

As an example, I used these colours in the small cranberry picture:

  • Quinacridone Magenta PV122
  • Quinacridone red PR209
  • Perylene violet PV29
  • Quinacridone Gold PO49 (I don’t think single pigment can still be obtained)
  • Winsor Blue Green PB15.

The last three are a must for me, but I might also use a brighter yellow or warmer blue. On this occasion I added a lemon yellow to lift the green in the leaves.

Introduction of graphite

Getting graphite on vellum is normally considered a negative. Graphite does not seem to work in the same way on vellum as it does on paper because of course it is slightly greasy and tends to slide around on the surface. 

I wanted sections of graphite in my pictures to try and give some relief to the colour. The compositions are quite small with a lot of detail. To separate details from each other I wanted to allow some of the picture to fall back and behind sections of colour to create focus.  I therefore decided that elements conveying habit would be either in graphite, or in graphite with a slight colour wash. But how was I going to get the graphite to go on reasonably evenly and to sit? 

I checked out how other botanical artists had handled using graphite on vellum, then tried out various ways of developing a technique on scraps of vellum.

Bilberry trials on vellum with colour and graphite

Luckily, as with graphite on paper, the use of water on top helps it to adhere to the surface. I also learnt that using a little mucky pigment/graphite water and allowing it to dry would also help to control use of the graphite on top. But, some of my details were much too tiny to make full use of this technique.

The way forward was to use a combination of graphite pencil for the finest detail and soluble-graphite. I generally used a graphite pencil first – possibly a 2H, then with a very small brush I either went over it with pure water or used the water mixable graphite. I found that the graphite worked much better where I had used a light watercolour wash first. 

Process for each picture

Once each composition was complete and transferred to the vellum mounted block, I started with the watercolour sections.

Except for the Cloudberry, the main branch which catches the eye, was enlarged to twice its normal size. I normally started with this so that I could determine how much other elements of the picture needed to come forward or fall back. After this I completed the flower and fruit sections.

Once the watercolour-only sections were complete, I worked on the graphite sections. As mentioned before, the use of graphite means that these sections fall a little into the background and give relief to the eye of the beholder. But the detail in those sections needs to be just as clear as for the remainder of the picture. Each part of the picture needs to give new information otherwise there is no reason to include it. In this case, the graphite sections were done life-size.

Last of all came the scale-bars. To work out the best placements for these, I scanned each picture onto my computer and digitally placed and sized the scale-bars, comparing them from picture to picture. This happened in January 2023 when preparing for professional scanning of the artwork.

Actually drawing the scalebars onto the final artwork caused most headaches. Applying the graphite in even lines on the vellum was more difficult than doing the line drawings, but I got there!

Now I will write about each species individually – starting with the next blog 30 April 2023.

Life-size small cranberry flower and stems. Water-soluble graphite being applied with Rafael 8408 size 1 brush over faint graphite pencil lines.

Foraging plants in the norwegian mountains – 11. My working practice

| Gaynor's Flora
Using a lightbox to make an overall transfer for the bog bilberry picture.

Transfer process

For this series my transfer process hasn’t been very straightforward. Once I knew which sketches I wanted to repeat in the final artwork, I made line drawings of each, scanned them and arranged them on my computer, constantly comparing and assessing. Once I was happy with each composition, I traced each sketch into its place on a sheet of tracing paper (see picture at the top), then transferred the composition to a vellum mounted block. In some instances, I continued to make further adjustments underway.

  • Carefully tracing over the image on the wrong side of tracing paper with a fine graphite point.
  • Rubbing the traced image from the right side of tracing paper onto art paper or vellum.

I also made separate tracings of each element in the design and used these once the overall placement was sorted.

To make a transfer I trace the line drawing onto the right side of tracing paper, and then repeat the process carefully and with a sharp pencil on the backside of the tracing. This allows me to use the tracing several times should it be necessary and leaves only a light line of graphite on my artwork. 

This way of transferring reduces the amount of excess graphite that tends to float around. The pictures to the left demonstrate the transfer process. 

See links to videos and blogs giving more detail on my ‘Online Tutorials’ page. https://gaynorsflora.com/tuition-2/my-tutorials/. ‘How to trace an image to art paper’ contains links to two blogs and a video.

Painting process

Before I start to paint, I arrange some form of cover so that only the section I’m painting is available to me. I might use a sheet of tracing paper, layout pad or clear acrylic sheet – or even a combination. Its easy for accidents to happen, the slip of a brush  or even dropping a laden brush onto the artwork. Accepting this and preparing against there being too much damage is essential for a good result. I have spent time scrubbing out mishaps and I’m sure many others have too.

Bog bilberry covering to protect rest of artwork from splashes and dropped brushes!

Here is my covering for the Bog bilberry picture. I have used a combination of acrylic sheeting and layout paper whilst trying to avoid too much taping directly to the vellum.

Painting on vellum

Painting on vellum is very different to painting on watercolour paper as the pigment lies on the surface rather than absorbing into the paper. Therefore except for the very first layer it is important to paint as dry as possible, otherwise any other layers will lift the preceding layers.

Arctic Tern fired on Ceramic. From an island reserve in the Stavanger fjord in 1989

In some respects, it is a little like painting several layers on porcelain – as I did in the 80’s. Porcelain is very smooth and carefully layering colour on top of an un-fired layer is paramount, or the lower layers are whisked away.

For painting on vellum I use a variety of brushes depending on the level of detail. My first ‘go-to’ brush is a Rafael Kolinski sable brush with a beautiful point; series 8408. The other makes of brushes I use are DaVinci 1505 and Rosemary brushes series 8 and 66. They are all kolinski sable. To lift out I use various synthetic brushes. 

Importantly for all these brushes is a curl free and sharp tip. Brushes wear quickly and the long tip disappears gradually – but the brush still has many useful functions, so they almost never get thrown away.

The watercolours I use are all artist quality but from different suppliers. Most are single pigment and transparent. I have occasionally used Chinese white as an underlay in areas where I need to control ‘lifting out’ as in the Cloudberry flowers.  When lifting off it might leave  a very slight sheen. If I don’t lift the Chinese white off, it mixes with the other colours and dulls them, therefore I have to lift off very carefully to create highlights.

In my next blog I talk a little about the opportunities I had to learn about applying graphite to vellum – That is planned for 27 April 2023.

This is a very short YouTube slideshow from a demonstration I made to some of my students when they were learning to paint on vellum. I painted the tiniest of crab apples on a vellum remnant.

Foraging plants in the norwegian mountains – 10. My working practice

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  • Benton Iris Farewell
  • Dying Rosa rugosa
  • Rhododendron Impeditum

Composition

Do these three pictures have good compositions? It is not easy for you to judge from these as composition is the area within the mount edge – the image and background.

  • Benton Iris ‘Farewell’ is Watercolour and graphite. The painting is part of the Cedric Morris Florilegium.
  • Dying Rosa rugosa is in Watercolour. It was one of the first paintings I did after returning to Norway. The sprig was sticking up above the snow, so it shrivelled quite fast.
  • Rhododendron impeditum is also watercolour and graphite. This picture is part of the Chelsea Physic Garden Florilegium.

Composition in botanical art is not necessarily very straightforward. As botanical art is ‘art’ it should have a main focal point that draws you into the picture. Once your eye is drawn into the picture, something needs to lead it around within that picture and prevent it from being lead off elsewhere.

On top of this, botanical art must be botanically correct. 

The first digital arrangement of my cloudberry sketches

Combining the art and botany for each picture is hugely difficult particularly when you have different sections telling a story about a plant. Having a series of plants in separate pictures that elaborate the story compounds the problem. 

To try and reduce the problem a little I started to arrange the pictures digitally. I scanned some of my sketches and moved them around within a 31 x 25cm area. It gave me something to think about when deciding what to include in each picture and how many more sketches I would need to get all the information I needed.

Scanning and arranging digitally gave me the opportunity to do something similar with my other species and the ability to compare them against each other. This composition looks nothing like the final one, but I kept rearranging until I was satisfied.

I worked hard to compose my set of pictures so that they looked a series. This can be quite difficult when some are from different families 

  1. Rubus chamaemorus – Rosaceae
  2. Vaccinium oxycoccus Subsp. microcarpum – Ericaceae
  3. Vaccinium uliginosum – Ericaceae
  4. Empetrum nigrum subsp. hermaphroditum- Ericaceae
  5. Vaccinium myrtillus – Ericaceae
  6. Vaccinium vitis-idaea – Ericaceae
  7. Arctostaphylos uva-ursi – Ericaceae

The first word in each species is the Genus name from which the plant is derived. Four are Vacciniums from the same Genus.  Six of the plants are from the Ericaceae (heather) Family and you can see this by the similarity of the flowers. One is from the Rosaceae(rose) family, and the stipules on the leaves (tags at the base of the leaves) is a clear indication of this.

Deciding the enlargement was relatively easy with the plants from the Ericaceae Family where the fruit is comparable. But as everything was larger on the Cloudberry picture, only the scale bars can give the size.

My aim with all the pictures was to let people see and understand the incredible flora and edible fruit available in the mountains. Many look at plants and think them pretty, or know where to pick certain fruits, but not so many study the plant and understand how intriguing it really is. This is an opportunity.

What to include in each composition.

I went through my sketchbook and made sure that I had enough information about each plant to fit on my vellum, mounted on blocks by William Cowley’s. I didn’t want to overcrowd each picture. 

The focus was the plant and its fruit, but one can’t do this without highlighting its flowers. I decided to introduce a picture of the flowers and fruit but restrict dissections to the fruit only. That is until I got to the cloudberry which was going to be the most difficult to integrate into the series. But it isn’t called ‘Mountain Gold’ for nothing.

In the end, all but the cloudberry picture included a branch enlarged and branches actual size to indicate habit. Each had an enlarged flower, plus fruit with both longitudinal (LS) and transverse sections (TS). These are the finished longitudinal sections from each fruit; the largest being the Cloudberry.

  • Cloudberry/Multe
  • Small Cranberry/Små tranebær
  • Bog bilberry/Skinntryte
  • Mountain crowberry/Krekling
  • Bilberry/Blåbær
  • Lingonberry/Tyttebær
  • Bearberry/Melbær

In the next blog I will be talking about my transfer process. This comes 23 April 2023.

Only Eight weeks until the RHS Exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery in London;

https://www.saatchigallery.com/exhibition/rhs_botanical_art___photography_show_2023

Foraging plants in the norwegian mountains – 9. My working practice

| Gaynor's Flora
By the lake Fjelløkteren at 1000metres – Ripe Cloudberries mid July
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  • 5.
  • 6.

Imagine how the artwork might look if measuring various parts of a chosen species was not accurate. The photos above all contain the Vaccinium oxycoccus subsp. microcarpum – small cranberry. Click on the images to see them larger.

  1. Small cranberry flower in the moss with Bog bilberry leaves, bog rosemary leaves, and heather. Note the tiny leaves of the cranberry lying across the moss surface bottom right.
  2. Small cranberry flower with bog rosemary to the left, bog bilberry leaves and flowers. Note the woody stem that distinguishes it from the bilberry. Sprigs of mountain crowberry also clearly seen with the white line on the back of them – this is the leaf folded back.
  3. Two small ripe cranberry fruit lying on the top of the moss by the side of a larger cloudberry leaf. There is also heather and mountain crowberry leaves. The stems of the small cranberry can be seen across the moss if you know what to look for – narrower than the grass.
  4. Two ripe small cranberry fruit either side of a cloudberry leaf. The reddish stems of the cranberry with the tiny triangular leaves can be seen.
  5. The growing tip of the small cranberry.
  6. A stem and leaf of the small cranberry. A further series of well chosen photos would show the connections of leaves to the stem, the branching and flower connections.

Measuring for the sketches

Amongst my original chosen plants for the 2023 exhibit were some very tiny flowers, but each of the species contained some tiny detail. I needed the facility for measuring accurately, particularly whilst sketching and of course for enlarging where needed. 

To the left is my trusty digital calliper in use for measuring the Cranberry. Whenever I take a measurement, I make a note of it with the drawing and additionally check it against the research done on books and the internet.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have this essential tool when initially sketching the Cloudberry and spent several years trying to catch up as already mentioned. As I wasn’t living in Norway at the time, I tried to coincide my visits with the months that I thought I might be able to get the missing detail, but either the plant flowered earlier or later than my visit. In fact, I didn’t get the missing dimensions until 2022 when I was again living in Norway. But even then, it still took several trips up into the mountains to hit the right time!

Another tool I use when making enlargements accurately is a technical divider. You can see it in use here when I did my Bilberry sketches. The divider allows me to measure exactly or enlarged by a specific amount. 

Technical divider adjusted to make a 1.5 enlargement.
Technical divider in use with bilberry sketch.

The other picture here shows the technical divider adjusted to create an enlargement of 1.5. In the ‘old days’ before digitalisation, one could write an enlargement of 1.5 (x1.5) on the illustration. Although this helps when doing the illustration, it will not work if showing artwork digitally on a website etc. 

In such a case one has no idea at which size the original drawing will be seen, therefore scale bars need to indicate exact measurements.

Example: When drawing x 2, or twice the size of the actual subject, one knows that 2cm of the illustration is actually 1cm in real life. So one could draw a 1cm long scale bar with 5mm written beside it to indicate that the 1cm line is in fact equal to 5mm. This means that when looking at the original enlarged illustration, if it measures 5cm, you know that the plant section is 2.5 cm in real life. 

But, these days if viewing an illustration digitally, there is no way of knowing what the size of the illustration is.

Scale-bars from bilberry illustration.

To overcome this if viewing on-screen or in a book, measure the scale bar marked as 5mm (our example) and note the measurement, then measure the whole section on-screen and multiply that measurement with the measurement of your scale-bar. This will give you the size in front of you on your screen or book. But you will want the real-life size and to do this, multiply again with the figure written by the scale bar – in this instance 5mm.

As an example use this picture from my bilberry illustration to work out the size of the finished detail and the size of the actual plant. The picture shows where I planned the scale-bars digitally to repeat in graphite on the artwork. But remember that the scale bar is in mm i.e. 4mm = 0.4cm.

On my screen, the scale bar measures 0.7cm and the section is 2cm high. Therefore 2 x 0.7 = 1.4 x 0.4cm= 0.56 cm. This means that the illustration is 1.4 cm tall, but as the scalebar is equal to 0.4 cm, the live flower is 0.56cm high.

My next blog is scheduled for 20 April 2023

Foraging plants in the norwegian mountains – 8. My working practice

| Gaynor's Flora
A year in the life of a Magnolia x soulangeana tree. In watercolour and graphite.

In 2011 I did my first RHS exhibit – ‘A year in the life of a Magnolia x soulangeana tree’. The tree was in my front garden, so I had a good source for the material I would need. But to get my eight pictures completed in time, I needed to paint throughout the year. The main picture from which all the others derived contained all the phases the tree went through during the year. It was whilst I was doing this series that I became interested in the inner workings of plants and started using a microscope. Of course, to do this I also needed a sketchbook. 

Sketchbook work

Malus x scheideckeri “Red Jade” in Colour pencil

Being a very impatient person I always wish I could get the perfect result first time around. When I started out painting plants, although I had drawn and painted most of my life, I was not very good at using sketch books. But I quickly understood that most of those who did botanical art also did a lot of work in sketch books. 

Sketches from my Crabapple pages.

Encompassing sketchbook work I felt was difficult as I paint directly from the plant in front of me. Why would I want to sketch it several times before painting the final piece? Surely the plant, or flower or leaf would at least have changed or even died before I got to the final painting!

For my second exhibit in 2014, ‘Small is beautiful; Crab apples explored’ I did six pictures from six different crab apple trees – also in my garden. As the title suggests I was doing an exploration of each crab apple  – again over the year. The final artwork displayed the fruit and flowers and dissections of both; I again needed my microscope and sketchbook to get together the necessary information about each of my plants. 

Malus x atrosanguinea ‘Gorgeous’ setup

But this time. I also worked out another way of using my sketches and my photographs. Yes, I take an awful lot of photographs which I use to confirm detail. I have painted three pictures using this photo; but each picture is completely different.

I used the same photo setup but picked different apples and leaves from the garden each time I painted a picture.

Below are sections from two of the paintings. Compare the difference.

But what has all this got to do with my work process towards my current RHS exhibit? 

I learnt a lot during the process of planning for my previous exhibitions and it has all come in very useful for planning this one.

My first exhibit was done in watercolour on paper and the second one was colour pencil on paper. This time it is watercolour and graphite on vellum. A completely different kettle of fish! 

Preparation and plenty of sketches is everything. 

The main sketch that I used in the Cloudberry painting was the one below, drawn in 2017.  When working on my final artwork in 2022, I found appropriate plant pieces to paint from and the Work In Progress (WIP) is as you can see. The immature top fruit is rather different to the sketch, and the lower one has even started opening. This development is not on my original sketch, but I liked the layout of the sketch and wanted to incorporate it in my final piece. The final leaves were painted from several new ones, to include the ‘tatty’ nature of one of them from the sketch.

Rubus chamaemorus – Cloudberry WIP
Rubus chamaemorus – Cloudberry sketch.