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…

Adding colour: Ricinus Communis Fairy continued…

So after the blue under-painting: https://nancyfarmer.wordpress.com/2012/04/18/start-of-a-painting-ricinus-communis-the-fairy-of-the-castor-oil-plant/ I can now begin adding colour to this painting. The colour is added on in thick gouache paint, the idea being ultimately to stain the paper, so the particular pigments are carefully chosen. All the same, I suspect something of a mistake in the colour of the lower leaves. The trouble is I don’t want them too dark, and with this technique that means adding white at this stage, and the dark green has gone kind of blue (though not, I think, quite as blue as in the photo). I will probably get away…

Start of a painting: Ricinus Communis, the fairy of the Castor Oil Plant

The third of the Poison Flower Fairies is under way! For the initial sketch and photos of the castor oil plant itself, and all about this slippery character and its deadly toxin, look back at this post: https://nancyfarmer.wordpress.com/2012/01/15/sketches-for-the-poison-flower-fairies-ricina-maligned-and-usually-innocent/ Actually this fairy should be called Ricina, not Ricinus, being female, so I’m not quite sure of the proper title of this painting yet. If I call it ‘Ricina Communis…’ I think people and google will assume I don’t know the proper name of the plant. Hmm… Anyway, I have begun the painting. This is the drawing laid out neatly on stretched…

Sketches for the Poison Flower Fairies: Ricina, maligned and (usually) innocent

I’ve been a little distracted from the Poison Flower Fairies this week with this and that: etching, paperwork and having taken on a commission (more on that later). However, I’ve two more sketches still to show you, so here, for starters, is another plant with a bad reputation. The first of these is a curious creature, not an ancient evil like Monkshood, but rumoured to be assisting terrorists all over the world, sought by several international law-enforcement agencies on several occasions and never caught but once. Toxic, certainly, but dangerous? Guilty as charged? These things are less certain of this…