I had taken the picture of this Paperwhite Narcissus and pulled it out of the background but it just didn't look that good. I put it aside. Later I was looking through a book of watercolors of orchids from the Royal Horticultural Society studying how backgrounds were handled in their paintings. You will have noticed that I use a solid black background for a lot of my work. I do that because it is dramatic and because getting a good background is a subtle and exacting skill that I have not yet mastered.

In any event I was looking at the work of Nellie Roberts who did watercolors of orchids for the RHS for fifty years. She often put a grainy shadow behind the orchid and it worked remarkably well. I tried something similar here beginning with a paler version of the orangish gold seen in the pistils of the blossoms. A diffused shadow was added and I was surprised at the result. I think it works and looks rather three dimensional.