Day 12 - Spider Orchid

                                           Acrylic on board 15cm x 15cm (6" x 6")

Day 12 of Leslie Saeta's 30 paintings in 30 days challenge. It's amazing what a big slice of each day it seems to take out, even if I only spend between one and two hours on the painting itself.
I didn't begin painting today until nearly 4.30pm and it took longer than expected to finish - nearly 2 hours. So it was pizza for dinner tonight!

I'm so pleased that I bought a daylight lamp on the spur of the moment about a month ago. It has come in very handy for the challenge when I run out of daylight hours. I purposefully didn't make painting my first priority today because jobs around the house were becoming desperate. But of course painting was still a non-negotiable thing to tick off my list of things to do.

Here is the reference photo I painted from today. Our native orchids, are very delicate, precious little creatures. They are extremely difficult to grow in captivity and therefore not available even at specialist wildflower nurseries (as far as I'm aware).