I spent an hour and a half on a single foxglove sepal and I would do it again
I have a commission due the first week of October, a large Digitalis purpurea study for a client who wants the whole spike, bells and all. One would think the flowers are the work. They are not. The calyx and the pedicel are where the drawing either holds together or falls apart, because that is where the structure lives, and if the structure is wrong the bells are just decoration sitting on nothing.
So this morning I sat with a 00 brush and a magnifier and did a single sepal. Ninety minutes. Quinacridone rose and a whisper of permanent alizarin, mostly dry, worked in three passes so the hairs on the margin could stay separate. My husband came in at some point and asked, quite reasonably, whether I was still on the same leaf. I was.
People who do not paint assume the time goes into the showy parts. It goes into the parts nobody will ever look at directly but everyone will feel if they are wrong. I have made my peace with that, mostly. Occasionally I look at the clock and think about all the things I could have done in ninety minutes, and then I look at the sepal and I do not regret it.
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The 00 brush and a magnifier for ninety minutes is the part that gets me. I would absolutely do the same thing and then look up and realize it's dark outside and I haven't fed anyone dinner 😅
I mostly do looser landscape stuff so I never thought about it this way, but you're right that the structure is what everything hangs off. When I try flowers I always go straight to the petals because that's the fun part, and then the whole thing looks like it's floating. Hadn't connected that to skipping the calyx. Guessing the three dry passes is so you don't get a hard edge on the hairs? I always flood it and lose them.
You have it exactly: dry passes, one over the other, each nearly dry before the next, so the pigment settles rather than pools. A wet edge on something that fine will harden into a line and the hairs read as wire. The other reason is control of value. Three light passes let me build the shadow under the hairs gradually instead of committing to it in one go.
Your landscape training is less of a handicap than you think. You already understand that a tree is trunk and branching before it is leaf. The calyx is just that instinct applied small.
And yes, my husband has learned to ask whether I intend to eat, rather than assuming.