Finished painting: Ricinus Communis, the Fairy of the Castor Bean Plant

The Fairy’s name is Ricina, of course, being a girl fairy… but for the sake of botanical accuracy and Google the title remains as the masculine form of the name. She holds an umbrella in memory of the time she got caught poisoning someone, and, weaponized umbrellas being something more suited to the Avengers than to real life, I have given her John Steed’s bowler hat. She is deadly, but, more sinned-against than sinning, she is rarely the actual culprit, though frequently the suspect… either that, or she has got a lot cleverer and isn’t going to get caught again!…

More on Ricinus Communis, the Fairy of the Castor Bean Plant

I will have to put this painting aside for a week, and so this is just a quick post to show you as far as I got yesterday… Here was the painting straight after its hosing down in the shower: At this point, a painting always looks a bit harsh, so I have tended to go over part of it with several colour washes with very translucent paints (some of the watercolours can be better than gouache for this, but the opacity of any paint varies from pigment to pigment and some of the gouache paints also work). The way…