art books reviewed

Voted Prac­ti­cal Art Book of the Year in 2007, this full-colour book teaches botan­i­cal illus­tra­tion using pen­cil and watercolour.

The authors of this book, Rosie Mar­tin and Meriel Thurstan, run annual paint­ing work­shops at the Eden Project in Corn­wall, UK — the largest green­house gar­den in the world ! This book is based on their course and is ideal for begin­ners as each chap­ter is like a class; it teaches tech­niques and then pro­gresses to exer­cises and themes for you to work on in the next chapters.

The book starts off with how to set up your own stu­dio space for draw­ing flow­ers and plants, and rec­om­men­da­tions for mate­ri­als you need. They men­tion a few brands that you could try, which I found help­ful as a begin­ner! Their rec­om­mended colours are not listed accord­ing to their real pig­ment names but by the names used by two brands, Schminke-Horadam and Win­sor & New­ton. This worked for me as I even­tu­ally bought Win­sor & New­ton watercolours.

Chap­ter 1 & 2 teaches the basics of draw­ing botan­i­cal illus­tra­tions. It dis­cusses tex­tures, forms and shapes com­monly found in plants and flow­ers, and gives tips on observ­ing your object. This sec­tion on draw­ing might be too basic for some, but I found it an enjoy­able read and help­ful in terms of things to look out for par­tic­u­larly when draw­ing botany (not just flow­ers but also fruits and veg­eta­bles). Seem­ingly out of place, Chap­ter 3 talks about draw­ing roots! This is an exam­ple of their imple­ment­ing exer­cises right after a chap­ter on tech­niques, and is prob­a­bly the sequence of their live workshops.

The author then goes into colour. As a begin­ner, I didn’t know that cool and warm colours mix very dif­fer­ently, till I saw the exam­ples in the book. Included are some color mix­ing exer­cises, and even a page on how to cre­ate the right shade of green suit­able for paint­ing plants. Like most botan­i­cal illus­tra­tors, their main media is water­colour. The  pro­vide some great exam­ples of washes, and how they can go wrong! Again, there are a cou­ple of exer­cises that you could try to get the hang of it.

The next few chap­ters cover tones, shad­ows, high­lights and details, all in the con­text of paint­ing botany. They are full of tips and tech­niques (for exam­ple, on how to achieve high­lights) and are accom­pa­nied by beau­ti­ful exam­ples. More prac­ti­cal exer­cises and use­ful tips fol­low, falling under dif­fer­ent themes for each chap­ter (e.g. daf­fodils, autumn, white flow­ers, pinecones). They really cover a wide range of themes, and you’re bound to find these chap­ters use­ful when you approach the subject.

This book is really chock full of inspi­ra­tional art! There are tonnes more of what I’ve shown here. Out of the 144 pages, a large major­ity are illus­tra­tions, but there is just enough text to make it use­ful. When I first bought the book and went through it, I was not draw­ing or paint­ing flow­ers yet, and there­fore did not find the lessons and tips use­ful. It was not till I started try­ing to paint flow­ers that I could fully appre­ci­ate the book for what it had — prac­ti­cal exer­cises and excel­lent guid­ance! It’s a book I can rec­om­mend to bud­ding botan­i­cal illustrators. : )

You can find it at:

The Book Depos­i­tory: US$17.79

Ama­zon US : US$17.96

Ama­zon UK: £8.26