Foraging plants in the norwegian mountains – 4. History of the project

March 30, 2023March 20, 2023 | Gaynor's Flora

**This picture was taken** **4 July, it had snowed and it was bitter cold with a wind behind it!**

Weather is very changeable in the Norwegian mountains and although mid-summer, it can snow. This can make it difficult not only in choosing species to paint, but also finding them and making sketches in the open.

I still. hadn’t decided which species I was going to choose to follow up on, although I did have a rough idea. A lot depended on how easy it would be for me to access the plants and whether I could find them in the vicinity of the cottage we rented each year.

Several of the plants I had been thinking about had fairly small fruit and elements of the plants were also very small. How was I going to display this? One plant had large leaves and two had very tiny leaves. Some plants lived in very boggy areas, several had access to water but the roots weren’t lying in water, and one was happiest in dry areas such as sandy pine forests. Some of them intermingled.

How was I going to work this out? I wanted an exhibit that drew together seven different plants into a whole.

I started by just sketching mountain plants with fruit that were edible (not toxic). This started my several-year long period of ‘Constructive Procrastination’!

I started painting the final pieces in 2021 after moving back to Norway.

Sketching

**First page in my sketchbook – Cloudberry sketches**

Today, my sketch pages are rather a mess. They started out beautifully organised, but as time has progressed, I have added more sketches, more information, and more colour matching. This means that my sketch book is now not a beautiful work of art but a tool to get enough information for completing a final composition.

This is the first page in the sketchbook I kept for this series. You can see the very first sketch of the cloudberry leaf that I did in 2014 whilst teaching at Åsgårdstrand. In later years I was able to add both male and female flowers actual size and enlarged dissections. BUT, I was stupid enough to forget to get all the measurements and have spent the last two summers chasing to find the relevant pieces at the right time of year.

I had other pages with Cloudberry sketches including research done on the net, and referencing different photos I had taken, but none gave me all the information I needed!

It took me years to catch up on this plant as every year is so different. One can’t guarantee that flowering will happen at the same time each year, or, as in this case that you find both sexes of flower. One year, we had planned our trip from the UK to coincide with a roughly general fruit picking time for this plant. But when we got up to the cottage, everything was long over as it had been a very hot summer.

I am telling you this here as it shows how important it is to get all the necessary information when you are doing the sketches.

**Cloudberry fruit sketches from berries given to us by a kind** **couple who had found ripe fruit 200m above where we had looked.**

Each year we rented the same cottage in the mountains for a two-week period. I spent the whole time sketching and painting, when we weren’t out hunting for specimens or picking fruit.

By 2018 I had not been lucky enough to find any fruit since starting the project in 2014.

One day we were out picking Bilberries when below me I saw a couple walking along a path with two bulging plastic bags full of something orange. I knew immediately what they were and rushed down to ask the stupid question ‘where did you find these’? I knew full well no-one gives up the location of their ‘mountain gold’ – a name used for Cloudberry fruit. But luckily enough when I explained what I wanted them for, they gave me two berries. The above sketch is those two berries. My husband had never even tasted them at that point, so they became a treat for him!

This will continue 2 April 2023

Foraging plants in the norwegian mountains – 3. History of the project

March 26, 2023March 20, 2023 | Gaynor's Flora

**Rolls of hand-prepared calfskin vellum**.

planning my choice of media

Deciding which plants to study and paint was only one of many decisions I needed to make. I also had to decide what material to paint on and with what!

I chose calfskin vellum.

**I helped to scrape the skins clean of fur.**

In November 2016 I met some friends at William Cowley’s and we were shown round the family business in Newport Pagnell. Cowley’s have produced parchment and vellum there since 1870. It is a smelly business, but they were able to assuage some of our concerns about using a material from animals. Apparently, no animal is killed to obtain the skin – it is a by-product from animals used for our food and milk.

The cattle, goat and sheep skins used for parchment are all obtained from farms where livestock has been reared for wool, milk or meat. No animals are bred to make parchment.
William Cowley website

Cowley’s staff select the best skins available and transform them into beautiful pieces of parchment and vellum.

The transforming process of changing the skin into vellum and parchment used for artwork and legal documents, is hand-done and takes a long time. Cowley’s vellum is ‘worth its weight in gold’. I bought some fairly well matched skins so that I could get seven pieces from them each measuring 25 x 31 cm when mounted; Cowley’s also did the mounting for me.

Vellum is a very special substrate and there are examples that go back hundreds of years. The Magna Carta was written on vellum 800 years ago. Today we have DNA testing and as vellum is skin, this can be a fantastic safeguard.

There are not many limitations as to what can be used on vellum with colour pigments in the form of watercolour paint, ink and gold foil well known. But graphite and waxy pencil can be a hindrance and not normally recommended because of their fatty nature and difficulty with adherence to the vellum. Whatever is used, lies on the surface and is not absorbed into the substrate as with paper. That is why the colours can appear more vibrant.

In botanical art it is customary to use watercolour on vellum, but I also wanted to introduce graphite which I knew could cause some difficulties. This was something else I needed to research.

Luckily, when I was teaching at the American Society of Botanical Artists (ASBA) conference in 2019, I watched two well known artists painting on vellum with watercolour and graphite graphite. I absorbed all the tips that they were able to give, and this helped enormously when adding the graphite sections to my pictures.

Composition contents

**Golden section overlaid *Vaccinium corymbosum* leaves** **artwork**. Note compositional use of ‘third’ lines and placement of main focal point.

Composition is a very difficult subject, and it is something many of my students struggle with. There are loads of ‘rules’, but the best design is by those who know the ‘rules’ and know how to break them; look at Rory McEwen’s work as an example. When saying this, it sounds as though I have overcome the issue of composition – far from it. For every picture I paint, the result is my subjective view. For the person looking at the picture, their subjective view is likely to be slightly different.

However, in modern times there is much research into the placement of the main focal point and some equipment can ‘see’ what the brain notices first when accessing a picture or view. As a baseline, the Golden section is not far out. Therefore, defining the placement of the focal point in a picture is important.

I have spoken to quite a few people about what they would like to see in my series of pictures. I had decided on the measurement of the mounted vellum piece, 31 x 25 cm, therefore I had limited space.

I wanted to paint several elements of the plants, repeated across the series, demonstrating details of the plants not normally appreciated. I hoped that people taking their normal flora for granted would learn about these plants from my finished artwork.

As I was looking at edible fruits my main point of interest was the fruit. But, without overloading the composition I wanted to give information about the flower, its habit and habitat. I still hadn’t decided exactly which plants I would include, but I knew that they would normally live several meters over sea level, preferably in the mountains and probably have some sort of association with each other.

Read on in the next blog due to be published 30 March 2023

Foraging plants in the Norwegian Mountains – 2. History of the project.

March 23, 2023March 23, 2023 | Gaynor's Flora

**Preparing for rain – view from the cottage at Flatvollen near Haglebu.**

As promised, this is the second part to the blog about my series of pictures – Foraging plants in the Norwegian Mountains. It will continue twice weekly until the RHS exhibition mid June 2023.

But what did make me choose this topic to study? It started at the workshop I had in Åsgårdstrand in 2014.

**Cloudberry leaf and remnants of a male flower** – **sketch 2014**

There were students from Norway, the USA and the UK, and I wanted them to get a feel for and learn about some of the plants that mean a lot to Norwegians. Funnily enough, like me, Norwegians take a lot of their fruit for granted and don’t know too much about them. I asked a botanist friend to get some plants when she was at her cottage in the mountains; she arrived with several, including cloudberry (Rubus chamaemorus). This particular year she only found male flowers, but more about this later. At that point I didn’t know they were male flowers; I was just disappointed that none seemed to be fertilised and developing fruit.

As the students were mostly new to botanical art, it was unsurprising that no-one had any real interest in painting the cloudberry plant without the flowers in full bloom.

But all were thrilled by the range of wildflowers available and painted many they found whilst on walks in the neighbourhood. For my part, the cloudberry plant material was enough to kickstart my interest in studying it. Painting the sample available was the start of my obsession for Norwegian edible fruit; it continued until I finished the series of seven pictures in January 2023

Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) botanical exhibition planning

*Magnolia* x *soulangeana* flowers – 2011

Over the years the requirements for exhibiting with the RHS have changed. I had previously done two exhibits for the RHS botanical art shows and had medals from 2011 and 2014. In 2011, 8 pictures were required for each exhibit and in 2014 this was reduced to six although one could have more. When planning for my next exhibit I decided to do seven pictures as odd numbers are aesthetically more pleasing than even numbers.

I will be describing my progress with all seven pictures in my blog, although the exhibit requirements is now only six pictures. I felt Norwegian edible plants would be an ideal topic and had hoped to complete the series over the following three years, but ‘life’ got in the way.

I was responsible for the UK representation during the Botanical Art Worldwide Exhibition in 2018. Scotland had their own exhibit.

My involvement in the worldwide exhibition happened quite suddenly when I realised that the UK would not be represented. I felt this was wrong as we had so many brilliant botanical artists. So I was determined to make it happen; Robin, my husband, suggested that if we got enough people interested, we should call ourselves the Association of British Botanical Artists (ABBA). Luckily, I was able to convince others and ABBA organised several successful events across the country representing UK botanical artists.

During the build -up to the Botanical Art Worldwide exhibition, it became clear that there was a need for an organisation to welcome ‘Anyone, anywhere’ interested in botanical art. Up until then it could be quite expensive to learn about botanical art and membership of existing organisations was based on an individual’s level of expertise. Dr Shirley Sherwood OBE was also of a similar opinion and supported the idea – something that really meant a lot to me and my motivation for continuing my work to establish an organisation.

The Association of Botanical Artists (ABA), now an international organisation, is still going strong.

Eventually, as I got back to planning my next RHS exhibit I recognised that there were some logistic problems. I lived in the UK and hadn’t planned to move back to Norway. Although some of the plants grew in high mountain areas in the UK, there were still some difficulties obtaining what I needed. For example, there were very few female cloudberry plants and therefore only a slim chance of getting material for either the female flowers or fruit. I therefore needed to get to Norway on a regular basis and knew that I could only do this once a year.

I already had another workshop planned in Norway for 2015, so 2016 became the target for starting seriously with preparation sketches

**Botanical art workshop at Åsgårdstrand**

I realised that I wouldn’t be able to decide which part of the plants to focus on until I had done as many sketches as possible at different stages of development.

I would need to make careful notes about colour and size of specimens to aid my decision making.

I will continue this story with a new blog on 26 March 2023.

Foraging plants in the Norwegian Mountains – 1. History of the project.

March 19, 2023March 17, 2023 | Gaynor's Flora

These photos were taken over the years whilst in the throes of this project – Foraging plants in the Norwegian Mountains. Haglebu, the area where the photos were taken, is about 850 metres over sea level in south east Norway and the area where all my plants came from.

I am originally English but have lived many years in Norway with a 24-year gap in the UK from 1996 to 2020. I lived in the valley of Sigdal for several years, just below Haglebu so returning to the area for this project was a joy for me.

Following my application to exhibit at the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) Botanical Art and Photography Show this year (2023), I received confirmation that I will be one of the exhibitors and allowed to show six pictures in a series of my own choice.

The topic I chose is the one mentioned above, Foraging plants in the Norwegian Mountains. This series of blogs is about my whole process from choice of plants to painting the final pictures. I intend to post the blogs twice a week right up to the 2023 exhibition in June.

Typically, many Norwegians forage for fruit during the summer and autumn periods of the year. This is understandable when you think that in many parts of Norway the upper metre or more of the ground is frozen solid and covered with snow for up to 6 months of the year. From late May until late September the Norwegian flora has a very fast and compact growth and development. If you come to Norway during the late spring or summer, everything seems very lush with lots of spring flowers everywhere.

If you travel up into the mountains, the flora is different but still very lush – as you see in the pictures above.

Spring seems to start off with the birch (Betula ) and we love to see the ‘mouse ears’ showing in May. The Norwegian national day is 17^th May and being able to decorate everywhere with ‘mouse ears’ really gives the feeling that warmth and growth is at last on the way.

One of the reasons I chose foraging in the mountains as a topic was because I always knew that there were differences in the fruit we found, but it wasn’t until I started painting botanically that I understood how to note these differences and the importance of doing so accurately.

When I first arrived in Norway in the early seventies, I quickly learnt which fruit was good and very roughly the type of area in which I would find it. I then learnt how to use the various fruits for jam, juices and puddings, giving the family a taste of summer over the winter months.

Now I have the freezer full of bilberries, cloudberries, cowberries (or lingonberries), wild cherries as well as the usual fruit from the garden such as red, white and black currents and plums.

When foraging, there were two fruits that were easy to confuse, but I learnt to distinguish between them, although not via botanical knowledge. I have since discovered that both are safe to eat, but not equally pleasant. They have completely different uses which, I will come back to in a future blog when describing them.

Both fruit are red and there is a similarity to the leaves, making it a little complicated when picking them – unless you know what to look for. The one to the right has many uses in jam and juice, whereas the one to the left is a stone fruit of which mostly the leaves are used.

What made me choose these plants to study?

In 2014 whilst still living in the UK, I came to Norway to run and teach at a botanical art workshop in Åsgårdstrand, a popular sailing village near where I now live. Edvard Munch lived in Åsgårdstrand when he painted The Scream.

I will continue this blog on Thursday 23 March.

Third part of Andromeda polifolia – Bog Rosemary picture

May 15, 2020May 10, 2020 | Gaynor's Flora

No, this is not the Bog rosemary, I will get on to that shortly. It says it is an Echinopsis mammillosa, but as ‘they’ had spelt the 2nd name wrongly, I thought I would check it out. Trouble is the only thing I can find is that it is not what it says it is on the box! If it had been, the flowers would have been on outgrowths from round the side of the barrel. The flowers are all on the top and almost without stems. Can anyone tell me what it is please?

We do have a lot of cacti and it isn’t me that collects them! But I have found them surprisingly intriguing. They were removed from the south facing porch and put on the edge of the pond about three weeks ago. Many have put on a show of beautiful flowers and grown hugely since then. How they will survive this weeks sudden drop in temperature from 25℃ to 0℃, I have no idea. Time will tell.

But, the reason I am showing this plant at all is because I am unable to go on walks at the moment and I am keeping a Perpetual Journal, doing a quick botanical sketch once a week. I saw the above cactus flowering in the sun and decided it would be this week’s topic. As soon as I started sketching, the sun went in and the flowers closed. They have remained closed since due to very little sun. But I did sketch some of the barrel. All I want is just one open flower to show its colour.

I’m sorry I am branching into other topics at the moment due to my incapacity, but the reason for the blog is development of the Andromeda polifolia.

For the last couple of years I have been attracted to very small plants with tiny flowers and/or leaves. But I am convinced that one of the reasons I was attracted to botanical art in the first place was my ability to open up these plants for everyone to see who viewed my work.

One might think that because the plant is smaller and often also the picture, it takes a lot less time to paint and therefore is cheaper. Unfortunately the opposite is true. The smaller the plant, the more difficult it is to portray. As you can imagine, my paintings are not sold by the square metre.

So far I have shown you the parts of my painting that are magnified so that you can see them in detail. But in doing this I also need to give you an idea as to how it looks real size; a ‘habit’ drawing. I wouldn’t want you to go hunting around for a plant with flowers the size depicted in the first blog – you would never find it.

You saw my composition in the first blog and know that I have planned the habit section to be in the centre, drawing all the elements together. When you see the final picture in the next blog, it will be up to you to decide if I have suceeded.

**The traced image and start in graphite.**

A little of the traced image remains. I further lighten every section with a putty rubber so that every final visible stroke laid is intended.

The leaves are long (relatively speaking) and narrow, leathery and curled under along the edge. I am carefully showing this first. The upper surface is veined and the colour varies from a pinky hue to a blue-green; the underside is a pale greeney-blue. But of course this doesn’t show in the graphite drawing.

By the time I get this far into the painting, the original leaves may have changed or no longer exist. However, I do have my drawing and loads of photos for reference, but I also have some of the live sprig given to me by Chelsea Physic Garden. I draw from the plant, but check the direction of each leaf with my line drawing and photos. Sometimes, I might find a more interesting leaf and use that instead, always checking placement and attachment to the stem.

The branch going off to the right is slightly further back than the middle one, therefore has a little less detail. I increased the amount of detail for the middle branch so that you get a better idea of the leaf texture and veins. Note the actual size of the flowers at the top of the middle stem.

Next time I will show you the finished artwork and describe how I do the scaling.

Second part of Andromeda polifolia – Bog Rosemary picture

May 10, 2020May 10, 2020 | Gaynor's Flora

**Distanced celebrating of VE day in the front garden. Reminds me of Claude Monet, The Picnic.**

I have to say first of all that we are so lucky when so many people are struggling with Covid19. We have room to move and we can get out at the same time as recognising we have to leave two metres between us and anyone we might meet. The idea is to prevent the spread of the virus as much as possible and save the NHS.

That gets me clearly to my next point as I am a sinner in relation to the NHS – I had to go to A&E after a walk whilst keeping fit a couple of days ago! We had a lovely long walk over heathland and I was looking for a spot where I knew Vaccinium myrtillus – Bilberry grew. This is one of the plants I have been studying and preparing for my next RHS exhibit. All of a sudden, my knee gave a great ‘snap’ mid-stride. So now I am extra grateful to the NHS for their treatment and advice.

I am now not only having an enforced lockdown because of the virus, but also enforced rest with my leg up. I hope that the tear will mend soon so the powers that be can determine if more treatment is necessary.

This means that for a few days I won’t be able to respond to the call from my shed to paint!

So imagine, Friday was VE day – 75 years since the end of World War 2. We had afternoon tea with our immediate neighbours, distancing from each other in our front garden. I am now paying the price and sitting with legs up on the settee, with crutches at the ready. But, I am enjoying the peace and quiet to sit and write this blog.

My previous blog finished with the flower spike of my Andromeda polifolia botanical illustration completed. I didn’t tell you that at natural size the flower and leaves are quite small; the flower is ca. 8mm long and the leaves ca. 2cm long. In my painting the flower spike is done at three times its natural size so the detail of the plant can easily be seen and admired. I have planned to talk about how I did the scaling in the last blog about this plant.

The next two parts are the stages of painting the pedicel and receptacle. You can see that the ovary is most likely fertilised and swelling just slightly. Also there are still a couple of stamens hanging on for dear life.

To the right a stamen is enlarged just a bit more. I was so intrigued seeing the horn-like appendages to the anther and it was incredible to think that all this was packed so beautifully into that tiny flower. The stamens were just over 2mm long and very colourful.

So the packaging; I carefully did a longitudinal dissection of the flower. See the previous blog to view the shape of the flowers. The petals are 5-lobed and fused so I needed to cut two and a half petals carefully away to show what was underneath. I then shaved back the single carpel so that you can see the ovary inside, leaving the style and stigma whole. Again I am including the dissection painting in two stages so that you can see how I have built up the colour.

It is hairy inside the flower and I used a little masking fluid after I had done the first layer. If I do this again I might put in the masking fluid on the white of the paper or not use masking and paint around it. The final result is fine, but I personally feel I could have done it better.

You can see how the enlargements follow on from each other. The flowers on the flower spike are the same enlargement as the pedicel and receptacle; that is equal to x 3. I then enlarged the stamen further to make the detail even clearer and this time you see it at x 10, the same size as the longitudinal dissection.

From these photos of my work it is impossible for you to work out the actual sizes on the painting, or even the actual size of the plant. I am trying to make a point here because many people still write a magnification on their artwork, then post it online or even print it. You might be reading this on your phone, tablet, laptop or desk top computer; All are different sizes, so if you give the magnification as I have done here, you have no way of knowing what the real size is. I will be showing how to do scaling in a later blog.

Finally, I want to mention paper – OLD Fabriano hot-pressed. I have both Fabriano extra white and 5. I have come to the realisation that I will not need all this paper to last out my years of painting and teaching. If anyone is interested and will be able to come and buy some (Bosham, West Sussex) after the restrictions are lifted, please get in touch with me.

The Blackberry on Vellum ‘take-outs’

September 24, 2019September 21, 2019 | Gaynor's Flora

**The finished ‘Autumn Blackberry Branch**

This blog is about all the mistakes I made whilst painting the Autumn Blackberry Branch on vellum. Above is the finished piece.

Since I started working on vellum I realised that there is a huge difference when working on the different types. This applies both to painting on the vellum and the ability to take things out.

From watching some artists who paint on vellum, they always seemed to use pumice to prepare the vellum. But each time I used this and however gently, I found it more difficult to paint on the surface afterwards and therefore to get a nice smooth result. Even when cleaning up after a mistake, I found it very difficult, but thought this was me!

Early in the year I did a workshop with Denise Walser-Kolar and the first thing she said was that vellum bought from Cowley’s in the UK, is so well prepared that it doesn’t need any preparation; i.e. no need to go over it with pumice.

The biggest difficulty is conveying grease from your hands if you handle it too much. But think about it; one doesn’t handle art paper either if one wants a good result, so why would one need to handle the vellum any more?

Just this little bit of advice has made all the difference to me. Not only do I try to avoid mistakes(!!), but if I do make one I am as gentle as possible with moving the offending pigment.

I will be painting on natural vellum when I do my RHS series and it is definitely more difficult to remove some pigments from this, than to remove from Kelmscott vellum. The blackberry is on Kelmscott vellum and I had absolutely no problems lifting any of the pigments from this. But I had to be very careful and not use more water than necessary. Even being careful, I could still ‘feel’ a slight difference when re-painting these areas.

I found that the mistakes I made were in relation to overdoing it or painting with too thick a layer because I wanted to darken something. In each instance, when I got to the stage I felt I had overdone, I took out the offending part with dampened cottonwool buds. I then painted the whole section again being very mindful of why I was doing so. All the time I said to myself, ‘gently does it’ and ‘the more thin layers, the better’.

These are the before and after sections. With some, you may think there is no or little difference, however a photo may not always show what I can see with the naked eye (and glasses!).

Hopefully this will be useful and an encouragement to those starting out on vellum.

Right side of leaf with two upper sections removed and the first section re-done.

6th part of the Blackberry on vellum story.

September 19, 2019September 18, 2019 | Gaynor's Flora

Painting the leaves

I am told that often people hate painting leaves. But the leaves on the Blackberry are really exciting to paint.

The original set-up for this picture had green leaves, although partly eaten up by various bugs. As it has been a few weeks since I started this picture, I needed to find some replacement leaves, which I found from the same plant; they were really beautiful. This picture is one of the new leaflets showing the colouration I introduced into the leaf set I had already drawn. The other two leaflets remained predominantly green.

When painting on vellum, one of the things I was taught was to keep the first layers of colour as pure as possible. The reason for this is somehow obvious, although I often forget in my haste; it is easy to dull colours, but it is not easy to restore them to their original brilliance.

But it’s not just about colour; for best results the brush needs to be as dry as possible so that the pigment is laid finely with the very tip of the brush.

The technique for painting on vellum is similar to the purely dry technique (as opposed to wet-on-wet or dry-on-wet) used when painting watercolour on paper. Even better, the paint is laid using a cross-hatch stroke in many layers when painting on vellum. This is a necessity if wanting to achieve a depth of colour (particularly dark colours) without getting a thick layer of paint that is visible when viewing the picture at different angles.

By the way, I use a brush with plenty of body to hold the pigment and an exceptionally good point; normally a Rafael 8408 size 4. But Rosemary brushes series 8 also work well, this time no smaller than a size 2 even for the finest detail.

Below you can see the steps I took when painting the leaves.

Next time, I intend to show you the mistakes and take-outs I made. Making mistakes is where one learns. Learning to deal with them is as important as realising you have made them. The ideal is of course not to make them in the first place; but that comes with time!

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My next workshop in Bosham is ‘Hedgerow Colour’ 27-28 September. Get in touch via the contact form below quickly if you would like to join us. If you would like to follow my blogs, put your email address in the ‘Follow’ section on the right hand side of this page.

5th part of the Blackberry on vellum story.

September 14, 2019September 9, 2019 | Gaynor's Flora

This is not a pretty sight; It is my desk easel at this stage of the painting.

I haven’t disposed of the original stem or leaves, nor the the additional berries used underway. As I said before, once part of the subject is past caring, I replace it with a fresh sample. There have been many fresh samples so far, therefore, although the set-up looks similar, the details are not. You will see even more when I get to the leaves!

But why have I kept onto the old berries? Because, every one is different. The arrangement of the drupelets is different even though they follow the Fibonacci pattern. They also contain different numbers in each berry. I might want that information at a later stage, even though the berries have dried out.

The picture also shows how I check the connections on my plant. Under the magnifying glass is the connection between a branch, a new stem and the adjoining leaf. The sample is in the opposite direction to my drawing, so I need to transpose the information as I paint. It’s no good me turning the stem over as the information is different on the other side.

You can see the developing painting on the right and my refreshed colour palette as well.

This time I will finish the blackberries and make a start on the leaves.

If I had been doing this on paper, I would have used graphite for the leaf right in the background, but it doesn’t look so good on vellum. Its a useful exercise as I will be using something similar when I do my Norwegian plant pictures for my RHS exhibit.

I have been trialling different methods and different pigments. For once I realised that graphite was not good enough for what I needed, I knew I would have find a pigment I felt I could use in a controlled manner. So which pigment should I use? I tried Daniel Smith’s ‘Graphite Grey’ and several natural earth pigments by several manufacturers, but each time the pigment felt too sticky for what I wanted to do with it. I needed to get a consistent fine line and be able to do delicate monotone shading. In the end I reverted to my own neutral grey that I often make using Perylene Violet and Maimeri’s Cyan; the latter is the same pigment as W&N Blue, green shade and works well for me. I can vary the grey from cold to warm and very pale to dark. By the way, the earth colours didn’t look quite right and didn’t recede enough in the background for my liking.

Now the berries. These are the remaining berries that are gradually ripening through red. I love the variation in colours here, but this is one of the areas in which I experienced problems. I will write an additional blog about my mishaps! Suffice it to say that each drupelet is a different colour. I always started off fine, keeping the colour fairly pure to begin with. But then I invariably overworked it to show the different colours. You won’t (I hope) see that on the final version of what you see here, but it is certainly something to bear in mind.