The Art of Botanical & Bird Illustration

An artist's guide to drawing and illustrating realistic flora, fauna, and botanical scenes from nature

Mindy Lighthipe

• Publisher: Walter Foster Publishing
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781633225749
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Techniques

Draw and paint beautiful, vibrant, and realistic birds and botanicals with The Art of Botanical & Bird Illustration.Take a sketch and transform it into fine art! The Art of Botanical & Bird Illustration is a guide for contemporary artists aspiring to master shape, color, and texture and render beautiful, realistic, and vibrant botanical artwork. Author Mindy Lighthipe, an expert botanical artist, educates you about the tools and materials traditionally used in botanical illustration, including pencils, colored pencils, watercolor, gouache, and pastels. This thorough yet easily digestible guide includes overviews of key illustration techniques and basic color theory and mixing, and it's loaded with exercises designed to help you learn to see shape, value, and form. By learning to understand plant life and anatomy, you can craft elegant flowers, leaves, trees, and much more in no time! To bring it all together, The Art of Botanical & Bird Illustration includes step-by-step demonstrations to follow along with as you practice taking sketches and transforming them into fully rendered, colorful pieces of fine art.

Illustration Techniques

Accurate Drawing

What makes a drawing come to life? A drawing comes to life when it is accurately rendered to depict proper perspective. This includes understanding the viewpoint and angle of the subject, creating volume by following the surface contour, applying light to the object to create gradations of tonal value, and studying surface texture, color, and details.

Perspective

Perspective, as it pertains to drawing, means recording a three-dimensional object on a two-dimensional surface to render a realistic appearance of the object in life by accurately representing all aspects of the object through proper perspective and skill. To make the translation from reality to paper, it’s vital to learn the rules of perspective. We’ll start with the picture plane, which is an imaginary, flat, transparent plane held parallel to the artist’s angle of vision and the subject. The subject can be seen at, below, or above eye level. Shown below is a box at, below, and above the artist’s eye level.

The Picture Plane

Note that the head is tilted to correspond with the viewpoint. Any shift or change results in a “different” picture. While drawing and measuring, it’s essential to stay within a fixed viewpoint.

You can use an 8" × 10" piece of clear plexiglass as a temporary physical picture plane to help with measuring and foreshortening. The plexiglass helps “flatten” the picture plane, much like a camera does when creating a photo. Note that if movement occurs during the measuring or drawing process, it changes the viewpoint(s) and renders the drawing inaccurate.

Simple Forms

It’s easy to see how the basic geometric forms originate from a box.

The cone has a flat bottom, but the sides are no longer parallel to one another. They converge at the top.

The cylinder has a flat bottom and top. The four walls of the cube round to form the cylinder.

On a perfect cube, all six sides are the same size. The sphere touches each plane of the cube in the center, indicated by the green dots. There is no longer a flat surface, as the surface contour has changed dramatically.

Surface Contour

Think of surface contour as a topographical map of an object. To clearly see the surface contour, it helps to create an armature drawing. An armature drawing shows how the different planes move, curve, and shift. Look at the basic forms below. Each can be broken down into specific planes or surfaces, and the shape of each surface changes as lines transform from straight to curved.

In a box, all the surface contour lines are straight. The blue lines depict the vertical terrain, and the pink lines depict the horizontal terrain. The top of the cube is also flat, with straight green lines.

In a cone, the pink horizontal lines remain ellipses. The blue vertical lines stay straight, but because the top of the cone is pointed, all the vertical lines converge to the top. The flat top and green lines disappear.

In a cylinder, the blue vertical lines remain straight. To depict the “roundness” of the cylinder, the pink horizontal lines are now ellipses. The top of the cylinder has changed from a rectangle to a circle. The top is still flat, and the lines are divided into slices radiating from the center axis, rather than a grid.

In a sphere, there are no straight lines. All the lines are ellipses. The blue lines depict the vertical terrain, and the pink lines depict the horizontal terrain.

Lighting a Subject

Once you understand the surface contour of an object, apply light to create form and bring...