Hello everyone,

Finally it is Friday. I just don’t want this day to end. The weekend goes by with a blink and most of the time I can’t even find time to sit, and relax and enjoy painting. Anyways… Enough with the complaining. Today I will share one of my fairly new but still old botanical illustration. I don’t have a scanner, so I am sharing a photo of it.

I painted this when I was in North Dakota. I found it on our back yard. The flower died really quickly, after doing the sketch of the flower and painting a few layers, I stopped painting it. Then I found another flower of the same species, and completed my painting. I worked on Scholler Durex paper, which is pretty thin. When you start putting several layers, the paper starts to get bumpy. There is not enough soaking with this paper which makes it harder to work with. The only solution is waiting for each layer to dry completely. Sometimes waiting for a day even works for the paper to turn its normal shape and be completely flat. The only good thing about this paper is, they are pretty cheap and still you can get pretty decent looking final products at the end.

I am not super happy with the shades on my leaves but still overall picture looks pretty delicate I think.

I hope you like it too.

I have a question. Where can I get good quality %100 cotton papers in US? I don’t want to order online. I want to pick them myself. I went to Hobby Lobby, Michaels, Jo-Ann Fabric and Craft stores, but I couldn’t find the papers in any of them. They are mainly cold-pressed ones and I want hot-pressed cotton papers. Is there anywhere else that I can take a look?

I feel like the main source of everything related to botanical illustration is United Kingdom. Maybe I should move there when I retire (: