【Digital】Hand-drawn Papaya Botanical Art Print — Digital Download

Hand-drawn botanical illustration, Papaya, digital download (no physical item is shipped) I drew the papaya for the inside. Cut lengthwise, the fruit opens onto a hollow lined with glossy black seeds, packed against warm orange flesh, and the contrast is one of the most graphic things in any fruit bowl. It looks designed. It is really the plant's way of making sure birds and animals notice the seeds and carry them away. Each seed is wrapped in a clear, slightly jelly-like coat, which is why the seed cavity shines under light. Drawing that shine without making the seeds look wet and messy took patience. I worked the highlights seed by seed, leaving a small point of white on each, and let the flesh around them move from a deep orange at the centre to a paler, almost yellow tone near the skin. Behind the seeds the cavity is lined with a pale, fibrous tissue, and I let it show through the gaps so the seeds sit in depth rather than on a flat ground. Along one edge I kept a thin band of green skin, because papaya flesh can be fully coloured while the skin is still turning. The plant is stranger than the fruit. A papaya is not a true tree but a giant herb, with a soft, hollow, usually unbranched stem topped by a crown of large, deeply lobed leaves. The fruit hangs in clusters directly from the trunk. Some plants carry only male flowers, some only female, and some carry both in the same flower, and it is these hermaphrodite plants that give the elongated fruit most often sold. Cut an unripe papaya and a white, milky latex runs from the skin. It contains papain, an enzyme that breaks down protein, and for centuries cooks have wrapped meat in papaya leaves or rubbed it with the green fruit to make it tender. The same enzyme is still used in food processing today. The papaya is native to southern Mexico and Central America. Spanish and Portuguese ships carried it across the Pacific and the Indian Ocean in the sixteenth century, and it settled so thoroughly into tropical Asia that many people there think of it as their own. In Thailand green papaya becomes som tam; in Taiwan the ripe fruit is blended with milk. I drew it from a market fruit, a long way from any papaya tree, and that distance made me look harder at every detail. SPECIMEN NOTES - Scientific name: Carica papaya, family Caricaceae - Common names: papaya; pawpaw (Australia); papaia (Italian); mamão (Brazil) - Origin: native to southern Mexico and Central America; spread across tropical Asia from the sixteenth century - Growth form: a fast-growing giant herb with a soft, hollow, usually unbranched stem, 2–10 m tall - Leaves: large and palmately lobed, clustered at the top of the stem on long hollow stalks - Flowers: plants may be male, female or hermaphrodite; hermaphrodite plants bear the elongated fruit most often sold - Fruit: a large berry, green when unripe, yellow to orange when ripe, with flesh from yellow to deep salmon-red - Seeds: black and wrinkled, each enclosed in a translucent gelatinous coat (sarcotesta); peppery in taste - Latex: the unripe fruit and leaves exude a milky latex rich in papain, a protein-digesting enzyme; it can irritate the skin - Green papaya: eaten as a vegetable across Southeast Asia and in Okinawa - Nutrition: ripe flesh is rich in vitamin C and carotenoids ON THE WALL, OR AS A GIFT The papaya brings warm colour to a kitchen or dining room and sits well in a light, tropical or Mediterranean-style interior with plants and rattan. It pairs with the fig and pomegranate plates to make a small group of fruits known by their seeds. A thin natural-wood or white frame keeps it light; a black frame makes the seeds read even more graphically. As a gift it suits a housewarming, a friend who cooks, or someone who grew up with papaya on the breakfast table and now lives far from it.