How to Start with Botanical Art

In this video, I talk about what botanical art is, how to collect and observe reference material, how to create reference photos in …

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foreign welcome to the watercolor Garden my name is Laura Watson and in this video we’re going to take a look at collecting reference material and making observations for Botanical art the first thing you want to do is find somewhere Outdoors that inspires you that you can visit throughout the year it’s not necessary but it really does help to create inspiration and it can simply be your backyard or somewhere like a nature Sanctuary nearby I like to visit a marsh that is close by to where I live if you don’t have access to an outdoor area in the natural world you can always visit a flower shop as well Botanical art consists of the study of flowers and seed pods leaves tree berries which includes fruits and vegetables and also the study of fungi and mushrooms if you’d like to also paint birds and animals you see then I recommend getting a small camera with a good zoom function I use a Canon PowerShot sx420is and it has a 42 times optical zoom and I bought this for less than two hundred dollars on a used Marketplace and for taking pictures of plants you can probably just use your smartphone it is ideal to be able to have access to the live subject of the plant and take photos of it if you cannot take a piece of the plant home with you then bring a small Sketchbook and have a look and spend some time observing the plan and make some stick drawings of it so that you can get the growth pattern and make notes about any little details that you see like little notches on the stem and how the leaf stems join to the main stem and things like that because sometimes these are things even with high resolution cameras you can’t see in the photo I love to visit the same place in nature all year round so that I can make notes on what I see and the changes in the plants and animals that are there when I’m walking and I also find it’s a great way to get ready for some creative painting time as it clears my head and relaxes me and I’m always super inspired when I get home so let’s head back to the studio thank you now I have my piece of Hawthorne here with two berries that I collected from the marsh and I’m just having a look at it and just observing it and I’m putting it right on some white paper so that I can get a really good isolated look at it and I’m going to take some photos of it this way to create a nice reference photo for my painting I’ll create from it and this is another way that I like to create reference photos for the watercolor Garden for you to follow from as well and I’m just using my phone and I did adjust the lighting to be a little bit brighter and then I will edit out the background later in Photoshop but you can also just use your phone like this adjust the brightness and you can get a really nice isolated reference image like this so even though I now have a really good clear high resolution reference photo I still really want to take a good moment here to examine all parts of the plant that I collected and do some other things to collect observations and this is something that I’m really inspired to do right now is examine the live plant if I can and choose paintings that I can do that I have access to the plant so that I can make little reference thing studies like doing a leaf rubbing or dissection so right now I’m just taking one leaf off of my plant since I’ve already taken the photo of how I would like it positioned when I’m painting and drawing it and I’m just putting this on the back of my Sketchbook so I have an even hard surface just with some washi tape to hold just this is a regular piece of printer paper I cut down into a smaller piece so my leaf is the back side up so the main jeans are sticking up more and now I have just an HB pencil and you may have done this in elementary school and I’m just making a leaf rubbing so you just move your graphite back and forth over top of the paper which is over top of the leaf which is usually the underside up because that’s what the veins will be showing as much and then you can see this beautiful accurate drawing appearing and I still to this day am amazed every time I do this I love it it’s so fun and you know you could even um stick this in your Sketchbook like with some washi tape and so have it sort of collage and drawing style if you wanted but what it really does help for is having a graphite sort of line drawing showing you the vein pattern sometimes it’s easier to see it on the leaf rubbing than on the leaf itself now what I’m doing is taking one of the berries so the leaf you can see my leaves are drying out a bit so this is in a second sitting I had this just sitting on my desk and I have just like a regular exacto craft knife this is really all I use to do my dissections and you can switch out the little blade which I definitely need to do soon and I’m just making some cuts on top of some paper towel you might want to use a little cutting mat or a piece of cardboard too depending on the surface you’re using and I’m carefully slicing around the berry and this is a Hawthorne ha or Berry and I don’t actually know what they look like inside so it’s kind of a fun investigative practice so I’m just easing off the one side of the ha so that I can see inside and this part of Botanical art or illustration whichever way you want to refer to it is really cool and unfortunately when I was in school doing my illustration diploma I didn’t have time to do these types of things and it was always a prescribed subject that I didn’t have in season where I was so I didn’t get to be quite as curious and investigative as I do now so this is something I really appreciate to be able to do so now I can see inside and there’s like a pit and some color change lighter in the middle so now I know that I can paint this and add it to my drawings what I’m doing right now is just preparing everything for creating a painting and a drawing in my SketchBook and this is coming together with the actual dissection I’ve made the stick drawings I did in my field sketching the live specimen I have as well as the photo I took now I’m doing my drawings just with a regular mechanical pencil and I’ve made a circle so that I made the berries sort of on feature here and what I’ve done is sketched roughly out a few sort of positions and items of the Hawthorne that I want to draw and in this Sketchbook which is eight by eight what I’m doing is sort of a painting feature enlarged for the full 8×8 page on one side and then on the back side of the page you can see here I’ve been making ink drawings with some dissections and measurements and notes and the painting you see here is the enlarged version of our Hawthorne which I used the reference photo I took because my Hawthorne is all pulled apart and dried up now but it really did help for the whole process of gathering my information as well as making my drawings so what I’m going to do now is just go over some of my pencil notes with this waterproof ink pen and this is something you could do on the back side of your painting or use a Sketchbook like this and make them so they’re facing Pages if you leave it as pencil one thing is maybe to put tissue paper over top of your pencil as the graphite will then smudge on top of your painting if you close the book so that’s why I’m going over the pencil in ink and then erasing the pencil thank you right now this is one of my favorite ways to use my Botanical art skills I had a lot of fun creating the birth flower series which are beautiful plant portraits but for me I believe being really connected to what is currently available for me in nature and then making more of a study of it as well as a painting so that it creates more of a story and a context is really what inspires me right now so I hope you give this a try because I think that you can learn a lot and build your skills and it’s not about how good you are at making your drawings and paintings it’s all about how much you collect and how much you paint because if you have a Sketchbook full of these drawings and paintings with all your notes and maybe they’re not perfect yet it’s still amazing you’ll look back in a few months or a year and you’ll be so appreciative that you basically took the plunge and became a little scientist in nature and began to study and collect things and it’s all part of the Journey of learning some other items that are really helpful for your Botanical art practice is a good magnifying glass I don’t have a very high quality one it still works but I might invest in a better one soon if you really want to take it up a notch you could even get an inexpensive microscope off Amazon you can get them for 100 to 200 a blade like the exacto blade I have here with some tape as well and you can even get a small dissection kit that has a blade and some tweezers and a few other things that just help pulling plants apart and examining them a little bit more you’ll also want a really good light I have really inexpensive lights off Amazon they’re just LED for taking selfie photos but they work really great for filming and taking observations I’ll put a full list of all of my suggested materials for Botanical art and reference material and observations in this post so that you can have a look at it and gather your tools and get started with your Botanical art practice as well foreign [Music]

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