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genuinely curious which one wins because i think about this far too much

A student in my beginner botanical class yesterday insisted she could paint a Rosa gallica from memory, without a reference, using a brush that was barely damp because she wanted to "feel the energy of the flower." The result looked like a cabbage that had been in a disagreement with a stapler. I try very hard not to be prescriptive. I believe there is room for many approaches. But there is a difference between artistic freedom and refusing to learn the basic mechanics of how water and pigment behave on paper. You cannot will a wash into existence through sheer self-expression. The water has to be there. The pigment has to be mixed. These are not negotiable. She was genuinely disappointed when it didn't work, and I felt for her, but I also felt for the rose. They are not symbolic abstractions. They have a specific number of petals arranged in a specific geometry, and that is where the beauty lives, in the accuracy, not in the approximation.

I teach a beginner botanical watercolour class at the local art centre twice a year, and I start every session the same way: I hand everyone a sheet of cheap cellulose paper and tell them to paint a leaf on it. The groaning is predictable. But I want them to feel what bad paper does before they ever touch the good stuff. I want them to experience the buckling, the pilling, the muddy washes that happen when the sizing fails. Because until you've fought a losing battle against a sheet of Canson student-grade, you don't really understand why you're paying for Arches. It's the same reason I still keep a block of that wretched paper in my own studio. Every few months I pull it out and paint a study on it, just to remind myself. It keeps me honest about technique. You can't fudge your way through a wash on paper that won't hold it. You have to be deliberate.