This note card was made by taking a piece of 9x12" acid-free sketch paper and folding it in quarters to make a card, as my sister wanted a birthday card, not so much to mark her birthday but as an excuse to get a card with some hand-drawn art on the front, since I'd recently made such for a couple of other people I knew. Well, all you had to do was ask...:)

Flower princess portrait; photographed 15may20; drawn about the time violets were blooming:)

I have been doing these flower-hair fantasies for, unnh 2020-1984, um, about 35 years now.^[1] And I still tend to draw the eye on the right higher than the left, an error I've been making as long as I've been drawing portraits. You'd think I'd’ve learned to correct it by now. The fairy, or princess, or lady, is literally one of colour (I've been putting magenta and purple into my portraits since, again, at least the early 80s) but I wanted to do a black person because these sorts of things so often only show white ladies.^[2]

The ladyslippers, particularly the pink ones but the yellow as well were a nod to real wildflowers I had the privilege of spotting many years ago while camping; there's also some clover leaves and extremely rippled tulip leaves (for which I was unable to find the reference photos, sorry).

common violet, ‘freckles’ cultivar; /OnePlus/2020T/20200504T

The first violet ref shots I found in my files were dated around 6apr—but there are at least four species blooming in my yard (that I think of as ‘pale reddish purple, ivory, common, southern white: the latter two interbreed pretty freely, and are the aliens most people picture when they think of violets) and I do have photos, such as the one below, taken in early May. The very fun Freckles cultivar, which I once tried unsuccessfully to grow from seed, actually belongs to a neighbor a few blocks away, and has naturalized (and interbred, to make a less spotted version) to the point of growing in their driveway cracks;) I was so pleased to be able to take my very own pictures of this unusual type. Unfortunately, in a lot of them the foregrounded flower is distractingly out of focus.

clover leaf with hoarfrost. Pictures/OnePlus/2020T/20200415T 1/120s, f1.7 probably with the clipon macro

Around the time I was photographing violets, I was also taking these closeups of hoarfrost on clover, which caused me to pay attention to their beautiful vein structure, depicted on the right side of the drawing.

So really, this piece could have been started any time between mid-April and mid-May, but I signed it 14may20. I enjoyed making it, and plan on doing more in this series.

Unless otherwise noted, text, image and objects depicted therein copyright 1996--present sylvus tarn.