Seafood plant in the botanical garden

Alpinia Nutans, Pisa botanical garden, 19 July '19

A quick trip to the Pisa botanical garden often cheers me up. Today that wasn't the case but it certainly didn't make my day any worse either and I got several drawings and a painting done. After making several drawings I found this plant with flowers that look like a cross between orchids and seafood. I'd never seen it in bloom before and it looked like it was almost done so I had to do a painting of it. Most of the flower clusters on the plant had wilted already and it also had some browning leaves. I really wanted to paint a healthy flower with one of those browning leaves somewhere in the composition, but unfortunately I couldn't find a composition like that so I settled on this one, a flower cluster sort of nested in between a lot of the still healthy foliage. Because of some trees overhead it had some interesting spotty lighting. With subjects like these the hardest thing for me is to make all the different shapes readable in the painting. I'm not sure I succeeded at that as well as I would like to, even after making adjustments at home, though I'm not unhappy with the final result.