Tuesday 28 May 2013

Tiny little pear


In early summer, some fruit trees naturally reduce their load during the 'June Drop' where some of the excess fruitlets are shed. This is our pear tree, just before it's June drop:



At the weekend I painted one of the little fruitlets.




Hopefully this year will be a good pear crop!

Monday 6 May 2013

Daffodil and Diploma...

I've just finished off a study page of daffodil bits: whole plant, flower longitudinal dissection, pod, transverse section of pod, bulb and roots, and dissection of bulb. I love cutting plants up to see how they look inside.






Apologies, as ever, for the rubbishy photographs but I can't find a way of taking pictures of pencil work that looks decent. Here is a close up of the flower dissection:



In other news, I got an email this week to say I had been offered a place on the RBGE blended learning Diploma in Botanical Illustration. I'm more than a little bit terrified but also very very excited! We start with a two week intensive block of teaching at the botanic gardens in Edinburgh in June. I've been ordering paints from the materials list, booking trains and finding somewhere to stay in Edinburgh and I can't wait to get started.

Hopefully this will be my motivation to blog more regularly - I'll try and post about how the course is going, and what I'm working on. Exciting times! Stay tuned!