It has taken me four sheets and most of a week to get the silver marbling on a single Cyclamen hederifolium leaf correct, and I finished it this morning.

The difficulty is not the pattern. Anyone can trace a pattern. The difficulty is that the silver is not a color laid on top of the green. It sits in the leaf and shifts with the light, and if you paint it as a flat grey wash you get something that looks like a print of the leaf rather than the leaf. I tried masking fluid on the second attempt and it left a hard, dead edge I could see from across the room. Third attempt I overworked it and the paper went to wool.

This one is four thin washes of a very weak viridian and French ultramarine, with the silver left as bare paper and only the faintest cool shadow dropped in at the margins of the marking. I did nothing to it for two days in between and that was the trick, as it usually is.

It is one leaf on a half sheet. My husband asked what I had been doing all week and I showed him and he said, "that's one leaf." He is not wrong, and he is also not a botanical painter.

I have five more to do for the plate. Some weeks this work is entirely humbling and I would not trade it.