This illustrated page comes from a 1920's German medical journal. Whilst I can't find out who the illustrator was, I think that the detail is stunning - every part of each of the plants has been paid attention to and carefully documented. Drawing something as to the likes of this will really test how well you look and study the subject whilst drawing it. I also like how the colour appears to be quite muted - whilst this may be partly to do with the age of the book it comes from, it seems to be something that is seen within a fair few botanical illustrations. In addition to this, I find the composition of this page quite intriguing. Whilst it is full of plant studies, there is still enough space for each piece to be seen as an individual study however, looking at the page from a distance, there is a real feeling of intense life.
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This illustration is by Christine Stephenson, an accomplished botanical illustrator. Due to the composition of the page, with the radish being positioned completely in the centre of the page all of the attention of the viewer is focused on the sole study. This example is by far the brightest and has the most vivid colours. And whilst it isn't symmetrical, there is an element of mirroring which appears to be quite charming for a vegetable.
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Frederick Polypore Nodder created this illustration whilst on Captain Cook's voyage to Australia. It was drawn to be life size and was the only way of documenting new plant species to show the rest of the world when it was made in the late 1700's. Not only does this have important historical context, but it is also visually a delicate piece which would have had to have been created within a set amount of time under pressure. Whilst the colours in this piece are not as vivid as the item above, there is a great amount of detail and i think that the different views of the leaves (with some of them twisted and bent in interesting shapes) are visually interesting to look at.
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I began with taking photographs of flowers and plants that I could then work from and use as a reference. I found that I had to really study and focus on the image and the plants when I was drawing them first hand to make sure that I was getting not only the detail accurate, but also the depth of the flower through shape and shading. Right, is a pencil drawing of a pansy that I drew using an image I had taken as reference. I found, particularly with this example, that if I wasn't concentrating on the reference material I often over estimated the size and shape of the petals; drawing them as I saw them in my minds eye rather than what they actually looked like.
Another thing that I learnt at this point is that drawing in this 'realistic' style was very time consuming and a small image such as this took a fair few hours to finish. |
I decided that I wanted to focus more on the composition side of botanical illustration for a while as I feel that this plays a major part in these types of illustration. I began taking single petals and playing about with how I could lay them out on a page. Doing this, I began to create paisley-like patterns. This lead me to begin to create patterns using the drawings that I had already made on photoshop through scanning them in.
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