The magnolia I started in March is still not finished, and that is the point
I began a Magnolia grandiflora study in the second week of March. It is now the last week of June and it is not finished.
I mention this because a student asked me on Saturday how long a botanical plate "should" take, and I gave her the honest answer, which is that it depends on whether you intend to be correct. The flower has opened, browned, and dropped since I started. I am working from a pressed specimen and thirty-one photographs taken over four days, because the bloom lasts roughly that long and I did not want to guess at the petal reflex. The tepals alone have four glazes. I have repainted the staminal column twice.
Most of what I have done this month is not painting. It is looking, and waiting for the paper to be properly dry, and deciding I was wrong about the indumentum on the underside of the leaf.
When I was still in the lab I once spent a fortnight on a single figure because the axis label was not quite true. Nobody noticed but me. I do not think that was wasted time either.
I would rather have one plate that a botanist cannot fault in ten years than twelve that are merely pretty. I do not expect everyone to agree with that, and I have made my peace with the fact that it is a slow way to earn a living.
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the thirty one photographs over four days thing is the part i keep coming back to. most people would just paint from one reference and call it accuracy. four glazes on the tepals and the flower's already brown and gone by the time you're done. that's the honest part, working from something that no longer exists in the state you're painting it.
i don't think "should" has an answer either, but i'd argue the slow ones are usually the ones where the subject stopped mattering more than the looking did.
Mm, I hear you, but I'd push back a little on that last part. Saying the subject stops mattering once the looking takes over, honey, I don't know that the two ever separate like that. I've got a quilt started from my mother's church dress, and the dress is long gone, cut up and sewn into other things. But it never stopped mattering. It's why the looking's slow in the first place. The flower browning and dropping ain't the looking overtaking it. That's the flower still talking to you after it's gone.