Just Draw Botanicals

Beautiful Botanical Art, Contemporary Artists, Modern Materials

Helen Birch

• Publisher: Frances Lincoln
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780711251335
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Techniques

Find creative inspiration with this guide featuring ninety works of art, plus techniques and tips on how you can create your own pieces. Just Draw Botanicals presents a collection of ninety beautiful images—created in a variety of media, including watercolour, coloured pencils, oil, pen and ink, mixed media and pencil—by contemporary artists from around the world. Dip in for advice or flick through the pages for inspiration. Each image is accompanied by a short introduction, information on the approaches, techniques, and tools used, and useful tips. Advice covers composition, colour, painting techniques, and tips for working with plants. This is the perfect guide for artists and art lovers alike.

The artworks

Carolyn Lord: Snowdrops and Lemons

Watercolour

Close-cropped drama

Marie Burke

An ageing beauty, the bloom in Burke’s Peony watercolour is just past its best. See how she captures the changing shapes of the petals curling over as they dry out, rendering them in hues that typically become richer and deeper just before the flower turns brown.

Before progressing to botanical painting, Burke was an artist-blacksmith specialising in forged steel sculpture. She remains drawn to sculptural forms in nature, as here, in the dramatic shapes arising from the drying-out and shrivelling-up process. The effect is impressive and flamboyant – characteristics exaggerated by the close-cropped manner in which Burke has painted the peony.

Tip It’s easy to crop without resorting to either scissors or mount board. Use photo-editing to try different crops without touching your original.

Mixed media

Inspiration and rhythm

Trina Esquivelzeta

With a habit of sprawling over the edges of its growing container, the string of pearls is a popular houseplant. The foliage looks just as its name suggests – round, fleshy, pea-like leaves are attached along slender stems. In Pearl Plant Print, Esquivelzeta uses a combination of watercolour painting and digital manipulation to produce the plant’s multiple ‘pearls’.

Esquivelzeta’s technique is simple, but effective. First, she painted the individual strings and some of the leaves using watercolour washes of green and blue. She then scanned and overlaid several versions of the work in Photoshop to give the effect of multiple overhanging strings.

Tip Scanning and digitally manipulating your work offers great scope for experimentation. Digitising your work also enables you to record different stages of progress and to keep a digital file of a finished piece.

Oil paint

High-key colour

Claire Pelta

Pelta has chosen to use a predominantly high-key palette for her azure-blue-on-white oil painting, Nigella. Meticulous in detail on a larger-than-life scale, this piece is characteristic of Pelta’s work. Drawing on nature’s colours, from pale and delicate to bold and strong, the artist creates paintings that are both sensitive and dramatic.

‘High key’ means pushing the values of a painting towards the lighter end of the value scale. In order to do this, it is important to understand tone. For example, in this painting, the deep-green centre of Pelta’s Nigella flower creates a tonal counterpoint in amongst the pale blues and mauves of its petals.

Tip Try squinting at your subject. Doing so reduces mid-tones, leaving you with darks and lights. Once you’ve established the tonal values in your subject, you can decide whether to go high or low key with your work.

Watercolour

Overlaying washes

Victoria Braithwaite

Braithwaite’s painting of a blackberry – the fruit of the bramble – is remarkable for its apparent realism; the luscious, shiny surface looks convincingly like that of the actual fruit.

Illusion like this is achieved by understanding the tones of the object you are observing – the range of lights and darks, from highlight to shadow. You...