Introducing the world's biggest gem lettuce

This is what is looks like from an angle - a crazy perspective which I rather like. I wish I could actually paint it with a warped perspective - that would be really rather funky, if a bit tricky! Anyway I am putting this in as several readers have said they like to see it at a mad angle so you see that it is in fact on paper.

So these are the leaves I tackled yesterday and today... the one I did yesterday (below) was not too difficult as I had actually put in a lot of it's foundations towards the end of last year. I also find darker leaves much easier to paint (don't you?!). there seems to be more room for error, even if the layers do take an age to build up!

The leaf I did today is still not finished, but I am showing you a zoomed in section of the leave for you to see anyway. I can't believe how long this one is taking if I am honest, I have been at it all day. I guess you could say that I am finding this one MUCH harder. So may bits of white 'nothingness'. Throughout the entire process of capturing this beaut, I am thinking of Rory's highlights... how he did it and the fact that it can be done! Sometimes things seem completely impossible, but if I know that he did it, then I can damn well do it too. So here's a crack...

The process of painting tints is a rather odd one. You have nothing on the paper, and yet there is leaf there... It's all about making the white paper look solid and therefore the leaf not holey, which is actually really hard. I would usually use many thin layers of paint, or my bristle brush to soften the edges of the paint into the white. However, this time I find myself putting in a dots and specks of a light wash, either of a bluish tinge or a light purple. Then going over those layers again with a darker wash (usually a blue-purple) and making the marks I do very angular and dark. So far so good, just got to keep going. Minute work with a minute brush which will inevitably take a while to do correctly.