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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.

I did a small study commission last month. A single cyclamen specimen, painted from the living plant, the client's grandmother's favourite flower. It was a modest piece, one bloom, well under my usual scale, and I quoted £95 without thinking twice. It took eight hours. Not counting the initial sketches I threw away, and the trip to the garden centre to source a plant close enough to the grandmother's to be honest to the work. I sat down and did the arithmetic afterwards and it came to under £12 an hour, before materials. The paper was good. The paint was good. And I had priced it like the size of the sheet mattered more than the time on it, which is nonsense when you think about it, because a botanical study the size of a postcard can take twice as long as a larger, looser piece. The client was delighted and paid promptly, so I can hardly complain. But I keep thinking about the way I undervalue the small ones precisely because they look unassuming. Nobody sees the hours on a cyclamen. They see a flower on a piece of paper. I have not raised my price for those yet. I will, and it makes me slightly uncomfortable to say so, even here.

I had a new student in my botanical watercolor class yesterday. She's a pleasant enough woman, retired, looking for a hobby. We were going through the basics of setting up a composition from a live specimen, a simple cyclamen leaf, and she asked, quite earnestly, if she could just take a photograph of it and trace the outline instead. I explained that tracing would defeat the purpose of learning to see, which is rather the whole point of the exercise. She seemed unconvinced. She said it would save time and look neater. I suggested she give it a proper try first, and if she still wanted to trace at the end of class, I would help her. She did not want to trace by the end of class. But the amount of energy I had to spend not saying "you are paying me to teach you to draw, not to show you how to avoid learning to draw" was considerable. I understand that people want shortcuts. I do. Watercolor is difficult and it takes years to develop any real control. But the shortcuts don't actually get you where you want to go. They just leave you dependent on the shortcut. I suppose I am old-fashioned about this. Learning to see, really see, is the skill. Everything else is technique layered on top of that foundation.