Artist in Residence at US Botanic Garden

Painting at the US Botanic Garden

The first week in October was my week as Artist in Residence at the US Botanic Garden in Washington, D.C. This unique opportunity came my way as a member of the Botanic Artists Society of the National Capital Region (BASNCR), a regional chapter of ASBA. In conjunction with the American Society of Botanic Artists' (ASBA) exhibition: Botanical Art Worldwide: America's Flora displayed in the West Gallery, the USBG presented the "Botanical Art in Action" program as a way of showing the public how botanic artists create their work. Artist members of the BASNCR volunteered and were assigned one week for each of us to be present and create a work from the garden's collection.

We were asked for our preferences in plants we'd like to illustrate, and I gave my first choice as the ornamental Black Cotton (Gossypium herbaceum 'Nigra') AKA Levant Cotton, a plant I'd admired a few years back when they had some lovely specimens growing outdoors. I'd collected some cotton bolls with seeds at the time, and planted them in my garden the following spring.

My plants didn't grow as well as theirs, of course (I have very poor soil), and the seeds from them turned out to not be viable, but I had a chance to see the unusual blossoms, which were beautiful! It was primarily the flowers that had beckoned me to choose this plant to illustrate, though the bolls are also lovely.

The USBG staff found me a nice specimen to work from, but as expected, it was too late in the year for flowers. No problem--the plant had many well-developed bolls, and I had brought some of my photos of the flowers to try to incorporate them into my piece.

The specimen.

The specimen was quite large, my first problem was how to approach the drawing--with just a few days to work there, doing the entire plant would be an impossible task. The only solution was to simplify: select one or two typical branches and focus on those. With that in mind, I set out to capture those branches in a line drawing and compose the arrangement.

Step 1: a line drawing.

The leaves were a challenge because they varied considerably in shape, and folded and bent in particular places, making them look very different from different angles. I traced my first drawing over a couple of times to correct the proportions, and broke up some of the stems to come up with a pleasing composition. This process took up the first day, while I answered questions about what I was doing and chatted with a number of visitors that came into the gallery.

Since I live some two hours away, I'd planned to spend two nights with my sister who lives in the northern DC suburbs, to cut down on my mileage. The rush hours traffic in the DC area being what it is, the actual travel time was only a bit shorter than from my house, but it was still a big help.

The following day I laid a piece of tracing paper over my drawing to do a shade and shadow study. While I was doing this, I shared the gallery with a class of some twenty 8-10 year old children who were learning how to re-pot an orchid.  Despite the added noise, listening to their class was a lot of fun. I was impressed by how well-behaved these children were, how engaged, and how the instructor was throwing them some pretty big words such as "epiphytes" and "terrestrial." After the class I asked what school they were from and was told they were from a charter school in DC--good for them!

Step 2: a shade and shadow study.

I added a detail of an open cotton boll in the empty corner in the afternoon. Once I had this shade and shadow study, I felt confident enough to start tracing my drawing in ink, ready to transfer it to the watercolor paper. I finished my tracing by the end of the second day there.

The following day I was ready to start painting, but since the unusual colors of the plant were so challenging, I thought it best to do some practice on a separate swatch of paper first. The artificial lighting also changed the colors somewhat, making them even harder to render.

The plan in artificial light.

Step 3: color practice strip.

My theory was that the underlying color should be green, overlaid by a reddish-purple wash. As a test, I did the leaf on the right using this approach, and the one on the left with the opposite--the red-purple wash below with green on top.  Applying the green first seemed to yield better results, so I went with that. Now I was ready to start the piece in earnest.

I started with the cotton boll on the upper left, laying in the shape of the cotton first, then the pod. while the washes dried, I began laying in the color of the flowers at the upper right. This was as far as I got by the end of the third day.

Step 4: painting the boll and flowers.

I stayed home the next two days to work on my garden and celebrate Herb's birthday, then drove back to USBG on Saturday morning. As anticipated, there were more people here today than on the previous weekdays, and I talked to a wide spectrum of visitors from many different states and abroad. It's a wonder I managed to get anything done, as I continued to add detail to the boll and flowers, while working in the greens of the leaves.

Step 5: underpainting the leaves.

At the end of the day, I had the underlying green for a few more leaves. The next day was our BASNCR quarterly meeting, and I would have no time for more painting. I'd have to finish the rest of the painting at home, relying only on my reference photos and sketches. During the first week after my on-site work, I put in the colors on the leaves and the first unopened boll on the left.

Step 6: more leaves and stems.

Step 7: the first boll and more leaves.

Step 8: two more bolls, leaves and stem

After letting the green wash settle for some days, I started putting the second, purplish-red wash over the leaves. Painting the larger leaves was particularly daunting--I was afraid that the green wash would run if the second wash was too watery.

Step 8: finishing color of the leaves

I was one leaf away from finishing the second wash on the leaves when I took a break to attend John Pastoriza Pinol's wonderful botanical art workshop at Brookside gardens. I wish I'd known about John's theories on color and transparency before I'd started on my piece, I would have taken a very different approach to my palette selection. But, even in these last stages, I learned enough to want to modify this piece to some extent. I've been working on the leaf surfaces and veins, trying to bring in more detail: the veining and reflected light, as well as the light on the bolls, and more color overall into the piece.

This story has taken so long to develop and write, I'm going to close this post now, without the finished piece, and show the modifications on the finished work in the next post.

Work in Progress - Carolina Silverbell

Step 1 - Pencil drawing

Four years ago I planted a tiny Carolina Silverbell Tree (Halesia carolina) in my yard so that I could enjoy and paint this lovely native tree. It was so exciting to see it bloom for the first time this spring! But the flowers opened during such a rainy week that all I was able to do was take photos of it. About a week ago I finally started working on my painting.

The first step is always a pencil drawing--working from a set of my photos, I chose part of a branch that showed an array of blossoms at different stages of development, from buds barely open to spent blossoms whose petals have fallen, leaving behind the fertilized style on the stem.

Once I have a shaded drawing, I trace it, rearranging parts of the composition to show another branch with leaves unfurled. At this point, I went out to my garden to look at the tree once more, and noticed that it had developed the characteristic four-sided seed pods (it's alternate botanical name is Halesia tretraptera)... hmmm, it would be interesting to add some of these seed pods to the painting. I took some more photos and added a few seed pods to the left side of the branch, along with a few more mature leaves, to show the seasonal progression.

Step 2 - Refine the composition

I then re-traced my drawing to begin the final line drawing in ink. At this stage I did further refinements to the composition, moving the lower right hand branch a bit. Looking at my drawing, it seemed to me that my photo had led me to enlarged the branch too much--the flowers were about twice life size. It would look better if scaled down a bit, so I went to our local copier shop and had them run a copy at 95% the original size.

The line drawing was now ready for tracing onto the watercolor paper. A half sheet of watercolor paper was about the right size, and, as usual, I use my studio window as the "light table" for tracing.

Step 3 - Line drawing in ink

After tracing the drawing onto the watercolor paper, I again corrected the drawing, referring back to my photos to refine the edges and shapes of the flowers and leaves. I had selected a palette of Cobalt Blue, Winsor Lemon and  Permanent Rose for the primary colors. I mix all the other colors to be used in a painting from these three primaries for a harmonious blend of colors.

Now, I was ready to start painting. This is always the hardest part--where to begin? I chose the uppermost flowers, laying a very light wash of pink over some of the petals to bring out the shape of the flowers. I go do something else for a while until the wash dries completely, usually a walk around the garden. Another light wash of lavender for the shadows of the inner petals creates more depth and definition, then I wait again. Then to lay down some color for the trunk and branches, and a wash of green on some of the leaves.

Step 4 - Laying down washes.

It's hard to restrain myself and wait for adequate drying time, so sometimes I work on other parts of the painting, being very careful not to get close to the wet areas--a risky process. Sometimes I cover parts of the painting with tracing paper to protect it from spills. After the initial washes are completely dry, I lay more washes of color to add a sense of depth to the flowers, petioles and leaves.

Step 5 - Modeling the flowers and leaves.

Gradually, as more elements and details are brought in, the painting starts to emerge. More layers of washes go on other flowers and leaves, deepening the color and defining the edges. Then adding the green seedpods on the left...

Step 5 - Adding more leaves and seed pods.

This is as far as I've got with the painting for the moment. At this time I'll probably wait for the seed pods on the tree to ripen more so that the last seed pod on the left below the others can be shown at its mature or dried stage--I expect this won't happen until around the end of the summer or early fall. In the meantime, I'll start working on other paintings--I usually have at least one or two paintings in the pipeline.