About Botanical Illustration
People used drawings of plants to recognize medicinal herbs long before the birth of Christ and explorers used illustrations to record the new plants they found before the invention of photography. Scientific illustration is representing the subject completely and accurately. A true botanical illustration can be used to accurately identify a plant including its flowers, buds, fruit, seeds, leaves, stems and roots. If a plant has significant seasonal or maturational differences, these differences are also documented.
Botanical illustrators today blend art with science in a way that is far removed from flat and academic. They are gifted in showing the structure and form of plants as well as their inner beauty. Illustrations can be more revealing than comparable photographs because artists can control their subjects and lighting to produce superior results. They show color and three-dimensionality that allow the images to “pop’ off the page.
Botanical art takes illustration a step further, allowing the artist to take the best features of the subject for the portrait. Art blends the accuracy of illustration with the creativity or merging different ideas, mediums and artistic interpretation to produce a representational portrait that is aesthetically harmonious.
Botanical art is labor intensive and many plant portraits take 30-40 hours to complete. Most start with detailed graphite studies, done with the intention of learning the various stages of the plant as well as its most aesthetic characteristics. Plants are commonly illustrated in watercolor using labor intensive dry-brush techniques. Colored pencil, which can produce exquisite detail, is gaining popularity as pencils improve.
Although twentieth and early twenty-first century art tends to be abstract, today’s botanical art remains very representative and accurate. Many of today’s botanical artists are self-taught because formal training in representative art is relatively hard to find.
As interest in gardening increases, so has the interest in botanical art and today it is practiced by a large number of serious artists. There have been several books of botanical art published in the past 20 years documenting contemporary botanical art by a variety of artists. In addition, there are many shows exclusively devoted to botanical art as well as many serious collectors of the art form.
Botanical illustrators today blend art with science in a way that is far removed from flat and academic. They are gifted in showing the structure and form of plants as well as their inner beauty. Illustrations can be more revealing than comparable photographs because artists can control their subjects and lighting to produce superior results. They show color and three-dimensionality that allow the images to “pop’ off the page.
Botanical art takes illustration a step further, allowing the artist to take the best features of the subject for the portrait. Art blends the accuracy of illustration with the creativity or merging different ideas, mediums and artistic interpretation to produce a representational portrait that is aesthetically harmonious.
Botanical art is labor intensive and many plant portraits take 30-40 hours to complete. Most start with detailed graphite studies, done with the intention of learning the various stages of the plant as well as its most aesthetic characteristics. Plants are commonly illustrated in watercolor using labor intensive dry-brush techniques. Colored pencil, which can produce exquisite detail, is gaining popularity as pencils improve.
Although twentieth and early twenty-first century art tends to be abstract, today’s botanical art remains very representative and accurate. Many of today’s botanical artists are self-taught because formal training in representative art is relatively hard to find.
As interest in gardening increases, so has the interest in botanical art and today it is practiced by a large number of serious artists. There have been several books of botanical art published in the past 20 years documenting contemporary botanical art by a variety of artists. In addition, there are many shows exclusively devoted to botanical art as well as many serious collectors of the art form.