I have refined the snowdrop fairy picture, in terms of execution and composition. The fairies themselves are still the twats they were in the original drawing. Had to get this one finished while the flowers were still out, or wait another 11 months for them to flower again. Drawing flowers from photographs is never very effective because you can’t get a feel for their structure, and obviously the fairies do not show up in photographs at all. There have been famous photographs of fairies, but as the Cottingley girls admitted sixty years later, those photographs – belief in which so ruined Conan Doyle’s reputation as a sensible man of science – were naughty fakes.
Of course, if you want to paint out-of-season you could buy your flowers from a local florist, imported from distant lands and faraway greenhouses, but the fairies have usually fallen off in transit, or worse, you may find yourself importing non-indigenous fairies, who, finding no suitable home in your garden, may go rogue and turn into a sort of goblin, causing no end of trouble.
Admittedly, the Snowdrop fairies are only one step up from goblin themselves, but since flower fairies are species-specific as I said in my previous post, they generally restrict their mischief to the location of the snowdrops
So here is the painting, finished while the flowers are still in bloom. It’s a little bit more delicate than I usually paint, but painting much larger than life size would have been a bit strange. There is some tiny detail, so I have included some close-up views. The whole thing is only about 10 inches square. And if you are interested in prints, I’ve just listed them in my Etsy shop.
Art by Nancy Farmer 
So glad they’re not refined. When they grow up will they be like the Stinging-nettle fairies, or is that botanically unlikely?