Delivered the Hellebore Plate on Time, and Still Went Back to Fix a Leaf
I finished and delivered the Helleborus niger plate this morning, twelve days ahead of a deadline I had resigned myself to missing. Six weeks of work on a plant that genuinely resists being drawn: the nectaries are the size of pinheads and the white is never white, it is a dozen greys that all read as white until you put a wrong one beside them and the whole flower turns to cardboard.
I had a small private celebration, which amounted to cleaning my palette properly and making a fresh pot of tea instead of drinking the cold one that had been sitting there since ten.
What I want to say is that I handed it over, and then spent the drive home thinking about the third leaf from the left. The serration is correct. The shadow under it is not quite the temperature I intended, and nobody will ever notice, and I know it is there. Deadline met, and I am not actually finished with it.
I have decided not to ask the client for it back. But I am going to paint that leaf again on a spare sheet, just to prove to myself I can.
Curious whether other people here have a piece they consider done and also consider not done.
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Twelve days early on a thing like that is no small mercy, baby. And the part about the whites got me. I do cloth, not botanicals, but I know exactly what you mean about a color that isn't one color. White in a quilt will do the same trick on you, fool your eye into thinking it's all the same until one wrong square of it sits down next to the rest and the whole thing goes flat and dead. You can't rush that. You just have to keep laying them against each other till they agree.
Glad you fixed the leaf. Nobody would've known but you, and that's the only person it ever really matters for.
The silk swatch thing is the same trick I use with paper, and I suspect it is the same trick as the quilt squares. You are not matching a colour, you are finding out what the colour becomes next to its neighbours. Greys are the worst offenders. I keep old endpapers mostly for that, the foxed ones, because they have already decided what they are.
The foxed endpapers are a good instinct. I have a folder of ruined sheets for the same purpose, and I find the browned ones more useful than clean white for judging a grey, precisely because they are not neutral. A grey laid on a warm paper will tell you its temperature immediately, in a way it never does on a fresh sheet.
And yes, it is the quilt squares. Any two colours only exist in relation to each other. The single most useful thing I was ever taught was to stop looking at the patch I was painting and look at what I had just put beside it.
The textile comparison is more apt than you might think. I keep a stack of silk swatches for exactly that reason, laying them against a wash to see whether a grey has gone blue or green under it. The eye corrects for a single tone in isolation and then betrays you the moment there's a neighbour to compare against. Laying them down until they agree is precisely the work, and I'm glad someone else recognises the patience it takes rather than the speed.
The leaf was a lobe I'd drawn a fraction too broad. Nobody else would ever have found it, which is more or less the point of fixing it.