Leaf of the Day: Kohlrabi Leaves ..yet more drawings

There are some days when you just wished you had stayed in bed with a good book aren’t there? Today has been a bit of a disaster work wise, and the only thing to do is just start again tomorrow. I am in a hurry with this assignment, but this sort of painting just can’t be hurried and of course things go wrong. So having spent all afternoon drawing the whole wretched thing out on my pristine watercolour paper, ready for the final painting, and laying down the first tones, I managed to get a nice big splash of purple paint on it. So far, for a splashy painter I have been fairly lucky, with only the odd little spot of stray paint but this is, of course, in a non disguisable area. If it were not for this assignment I would have turned it into an insect of some sort..but hey, it’s just sods law and better it was at the start of the painting than at the end. So I am drawing it out yet again.. I am getting a bit fed up with kohlrabi!

I did however make some more quick sketches, a drawing of one of the leaves just to sort the shape out and then a quick painting of one of the folded leaves. They are quite complicated with an irregularly serrated edge, in fact nothing is quite regular about them. There are little ancillary leaflets which grow at intervals along the stem (petiole) and the main blade of each leaf has deep divisions at the base, but not always two. As you pull the leaf away from the rounded and thickened part of the stem, there always seem to be 5, 6 or 7 main veins which anchor the leaf and pull away leaving the little indentations on the leaf scar. Fascinating.
Well I guess finished version 2 will be better…Hmmmm. Meanwhile I am going to find some chocolate..
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More Leaves…