I'm not entirely happy with it but I think I am finally on the right track. Here's the difficulty: this plant grows low and wide, except for the small, thin flower stalks that shoot up seemingly out of nowhere. The image needs to be vertical, to show the most accurate botanical information, so my perspective needs to be looking at the plant as if I were almost at eye level, kneeling in the forest. (Not looking down at it from a towering height.) Unfortunately, most folks who have ever taken a picture of this plant in bloom, and then kindly shared it on the internet, have not gotten down on the ground but rather set their tripod up above the plant. I can't copy anyone's photo, of course, but it would sure be nice to see different angles! So what do I do? Well I have pretty much got the idea of how this plant grows. I know the dimensions of the young and mature leaves. I know how tall and wide the plant can get. I know how big the flowers are. I can extrapolate from my baby plant, which is just now coming out of dormancy. I put all this information together and come up with ideas of how to present the plant in an interesting way on a two-dimensional sheet of paper. The composition challenge! This is where the creativity comes in, as I've said before. In my view, the composition has to have movement because it is of a living thing. I want your eye to travel all around the plant and see all the interesting parts. Since the leaves are like bending, twisting ribbons, and the flower stalks are quite graceful, I can use them to this effect. That's the hope anyway!
Another aspect of creating the composition is making some very basic decisions of how I'm going to make the finished piece. Remember I mentioned the other day that the flowers are small white pompoms? To paint them, I would need to place leaves behind them so that the viewer could see the white flowers against a green background. But it turns out in nature, the leaves don't grow vertically as tall as the flower and one would never see a leaf sticking straight up behind a Fraser's sedge flower. And I've already decided not to work from a high angle (which would put leaves behind the flowers, but would eliminate the ability to show the full stalk and would make the composition too horizontal.) The parts of the flower are so teeny I can't imagine using shades of gray paint to outline each filament. The better course of action is to make this a graphite drawing and make use of a very sharp pencil point!
I have also decided not to dig up the roots of my baby plant. It is trying so hard to survive, I hate the thought of stressing it in such a way. It is a rare specimen, after all! Instead, I might do a close up sketch of one blossom to the side of the plant. It really is quite pretty and - naturally - is another example of the Fibonacci sequence. More on that later.......
Stay tuned!
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