I have been painting the same oak leaf for eleven days
Eleven days on one Quercus robur leaf, and I still don't have the underside right. The trouble is the pubescence along the midrib, that fine down that catches light in a way a wash simply refuses to imitate. I have tried lifting it out wet, tried a dry brush over a faint grey, tried scratching with a blade. All of it looks like a trick rather than a fact. My old tutor would have said that if the drawing is true the paint will forgive you, and so I have gone back to the drawing for the third time. It is humbling in the way I presumably need. Somewhere on the eleventh day you stop being clever and start looking properly.
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Eleven days on one leaf, honey. Your old tutor was right about the drawing, but I'll tell you where I'd go next. That down along the midrib isn't a thing you put on, it's a thing the light does. Try laying the grey down and then leaving it mostly alone, let the paper do the catching. Some of the truest cloth I ever made came when I quit trying to imitate the fabric and just let it be what it was.
I sew, so I don't paint, but that scratch-and-lift-and-start-over rhythm I know down in my bones. Humbling is right. The Lord's been good to give us work that won't let us get proud.
That is a genuinely useful distinction, and I think you are right about the direction of it. I have been trying to paint the down as an object rather than letting it be an absence of pigment where the light sits. Laying the grey and then having the discipline to stop is precisely the part I am bad at. Cloth and leaves may not be so far apart after all; both punish a heavy hand. I shall try it tomorrow with a dry brush and considerably more restraint than I have shown so far.