Painting a watercolour of a foxglove in the garden

I wanted to send my uncle a get-well-soon card, so I decided to make my own in watercolour. And what better subject than the foxgloves at the end of the garden and the bees that swarm around them? Actually, it turns out that foxgloves are quite hard to paint close up. I know that now, but I've made the card already. 

First of all I took some photos of my foxgloves and also as many photos of bees as possible, as they move too fast to be able to paint them well from life.

Then I made a pencil sketch of the foxglove with some of the bees, having marked out the size of the card on my bigger piece of paper for sketching.

I then transferred a really light version of the sketch onto my watercolour paper by putting my watercolour paper over the sketch on the inside of a window facing the sun (my own cheaper version of a light box) and marking the key lines in lightly with a pencil.

Next, I masking-taped my watercolour paper to a piece of card and put a faint, intentionally patchy sky-blue wash around the background, using plenty of water. I wanted it to be reminiscent of the sky, even though that wasn't the foxglove's actual background. The reason I chose this background was because I didn't want it to distract from the foxglove.

I then mixed a colour for the foxglove flowers and started filling it into my lightly sketched pattern. It was so sunny out that the colour kept drying out and I had to make more. Every time I ended up making a slightly different colour, but this ended up working to my advantage. 

I'd run out of masking fluid, so I had to make sure that I left areas I wanted to stay white unpainted without any help from masking fluid.

After I had all the lighter background colours in, I filled in the darker colours, including the bees. There's a real difference between the bee in the air, which I sketched and painted based on one of the photos I'd taken earlier, and the bees on the foxglove, which I sketched while they were there and painted from memory. In retrospect, I should have done all the bees from photographs. I also notice from looking at the photographs that I should have added some stronger green parts to the stem.

When it was finished, I took the masking tape off and folded the card back up. I'd already folded the paper before I even started. In retrospect, I should have scored along the fold using a ruler and scissors, as the paper was so thick that it creased all the way along the fold.

Nevertheless, overall I was happy with it as a card and I hope it cheers my uncle up.