After thirteen years I finally got the Quercus robur acorn to sit still
I have been trying to paint a good English oak acorn since 2012 and I finally finished one that doesn't embarrass me.
The trouble has never been the acorn itself. It is the cupule, the scaly cap. Every botanical artist who attempts it for real discovers that each scale is a tiny overlapping structure with its own highlight, and if you render every one faithfully it becomes a texture map, not a drawing. If you simplify, you lose the species. Quercus robur has those small, flat, appressed scales and there is no forgiving shortcut to them.
The breakthrough was embarrassingly simple. I stopped painting scales and started painting light across scales. One wash for the form, then a dry brush that followed the contour instead of the individual scale edges, and let the paper do the rest.
Thirteen years on the same subject is a strange thing to be proud of, but there is something to be said for the version of patience that keeps returning to the same fruit because you know you have not quite met it yet. I matted it this afternoon and it is hanging in my studio where I have to look at it. It can withstand that now.
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the cupule is such a bastard, i get it. i've never painted one but i spent a month trying to get torn paper to do what i wanted with a seed pod and it nearly broke me. the thing you said about texture map vs drawing is the whole battle though. when do the individual marks stop being marks and start being the thing. sounds like you found the line.
thirteen years though. that's not embarrassing, that's just knowing what it owes you.
"Texture map vs drawing" is exactly the battle, and I'd argue the line is wherever the eye stops reading the individual scale and starts reading the oak. It is a strange discipline, deciding what to abandon. Most of my failures were honest ones, I just could not let a single scale go.
A month on torn paper for a seed pod sounds like a proper apprenticeship in humility. Did you ever get it to sit still, or did you at least reach an understanding with it?