Botanical Art -- Week 4 of 5 (and white paper phobia)

This week we focused on texture and then started to work on something we should be working on for this week and next. I found my plant, a desert ground orchid (Eulophia petersii) and did a few thumbnails and then started on a sample. There is enough texture, shape, and simple leaves and not a huge variation of color that I thought I could handle this. Here it is on cardboard, just the beginning of the whole plant. I have a weird fear or repulsion of the blank white page.

The cardboard is from the bottom of a shipping box at work. I saved it because I must have been thinking in the back of my mind that I was having a white-paper phobia.

I like this.

I did some texture painting on big sheets of white paper so that I could jump in and start drawing (maybe). It must be an art sickness, this white-paper phobia. I also found a partial sheet of grey/gray toned paper (Zerkall Frankfurt) in the basement. It's printing paper, not water media paper but I love the paper with ink and not-such-wet-watery media. It's almost the same exact color as bottom-of-the-box cardboard!

This is what it looks like in the CBS conservatory:

This is what it looks like in the wild: