Botanical illustration class Day 3

On the final day of class, I remembered to take some photographs with the iPhone. Here is Sarah giving us a demonstration on how to paint the leaves.
Remember we had started with a wash of lemon yellow nickel titanium and now we she is adding the layers of green. Sarah always has 2 brushes ready-one is your paint brush and the other is your water brush. The advantage of this is that you can paint the color with one brush and the soften the edges using the other brush. She demonstrated this by by touching the painted edge with the water brush and "pulling" it out. A wash of the lemon yellow nickel titanium is also applied as a final step which helps to hold the color together on the leaves.

Here is a photo of our class. That's Diana, Alexis, and Sarah. It was held at the Copley Society of Art gallery (thus all of the wonderful artwork on the wall)

Towards the end of class, we moved on to start painting the pansy flowers. Again, lots of layering, always following our tonal study, and adding more and more detail as you go along. Here is my pansy painting as of the end of class.
Sarah showed us one of her pansy paintings on vellum that she has been working on for 5 years. Whew, if it takes her that long, I can't even imagine how long this will take me to finish!