Botanical illustration class Day 3

On the final day of class, I remembered to take some photographs with the iPhone. Here is Sarah giving us a demonstration on how to paint the leaves.
Remember we had started with a wash of lemon yellow nickel titanium and now we she is adding the layers of green. Sarah always has 2 brushes ready-one is your paint brush and the other is your water brush. The advantage of this is that you can paint the color with one brush and the soften the edges using the other brush. She demonstrated this by by touching the painted edge with the water brush and "pulling" it out. A wash of the lemon yellow nickel titanium is also applied as a final step which helps to hold the color together on the leaves.

Here is a photo of our class. That's Diana, Alexis, and Sarah. It was held at the Copley Society of Art gallery (thus all of the wonderful artwork on the wall)

Towards the end of class, we moved on to start painting the pansy flowers. Again, lots of layering, always following our tonal study, and adding more and more detail as you go along. Here is my pansy painting as of the end of class.
Sarah showed us one of her pansy paintings on vellum that she has been working on for 5 years. Whew, if it takes her that long, I can't even imagine how long this will take me to finish!

Botanical illustration class Day 2

In the second class with botanical artist, Sarah Roche, we focused on creating a final composition based on our pansy plants. It is important to render the various growth stages of your plant and all of the varied leaf structures. One way to think about it is that if someone was looking for that plant, they could bring your drawing to a nursery and be able to identify it. Therefore, your drawing needs to be informative and as accurate as possible.
At the top of the sketch paper you will see the order of the stages you need to create your sketch-Scale, Proportion, Shape, and Detail. You want to first make sure you establish your scale by lightly mapping out the main parts and their relationship to one another. Then, you want to make sure your proportions are correct. At this point you are really just drawing very light lines to establish the dimensions. Then you start sketching in the basic shapes, and it's only once those things have been established that you should start to add detail.

We used tracing paper to transfer our drawing onto the watercolor paper. After tracing our drawings, we flipped it over and retraced the lines again. To transfer our sketch onto the watercolor paper, we flipped it over again and traced it using a colored pencil. The reason you use a colored pencil is so that you can keep track of what lines you have already drawn. After the transfer, you can then add back in the detail to your drawing, making sure to keep the lines very light. Here is the handout she gave us that explains this process.
We used our tracing paper sketch to start establishing the tonal study for each leaf (remember the football diagram from my last post?) In our last few minutes of class-the time just flew by-we gave each leaf a quick wash of Lemon Yellow Nickel Titanium that represents the tonal areas we had just determined. I learned that botanical illustration is about layering, layering, and more layering, building up the colors very slowly.

More about that in my next post-Day 3!

Botanical illustration class Day 1

For the last three Monday mornings, I have been taking a wonderful class with botanical artist Sarah Roche. There was so much information to learn and share that I think I'll need to do a few separate posts.

The first day we focused on shading from dark to light. I thought I would show you how she sharpens the pencils (we used HB and F). Using an exacto or utility knife, she widdles the wood off the lead so that about 1/4" to 1/2" of the lead is exposed. This then allows you to sharpen the point by rubbing on the sandpaper .
Sarah had us practice a tonal rendering technique she likes to call "roundy-roundy". You are really just caressing the paper with small circles that are overlapping and slowly build up as you go from dark to light. This was the first shape we had us render.
As a second practice exercise, she had us draw several strips that were overlapping one another on our paper. Here is my "fetticini" rendering.
For this exercise, you want to make the strips in back the darkest and the strips in the front the lightest shades. If I was going to shade these before taking this class, I would probably use a combination of lines, cross hatching, and smudging with my finger. I found this roundy-roundy technique very relaxing and it forced me to take my time and really get in the zone.

In botanical drawing, traditionally the light comes from the left. She showed us this "football" diagram and said that all leaves can be rendered with this shading once you see how the light is hitting it.
Then, she gave each of us a purple pansy plant and we discussed the different types of leaves we could see, the varied growth stages of the flower, and the parts of the plant itself. She had us pick one leaf from the plant and, using this chart, we tried to identify it's outline, tip, base, etc.
Here is my rendered pansy leaf.
For homework practice, she had us shade each of these shapes. She says that most plants are made up of these different shapes, so knowing how to render them is critical. Note the scale at the top going from 1 to 7. You never want to have too much of one of these shades. It should be a smooth transition from dark to light.
Next up-Day 2.