Selecting specimens at a Going Green workshop in Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia. “Botanical art instruction” is in one particular way an unfortunate term. ”Instruction” implies “command”, that is, being commanded or instructed to do something in a particular way. And...
Yellow is the most problematic primary pigment. So much so that many botanical artists avoid painting yellow subjects entirely. It’s problematic for a number of reasons. It’s tough to get yellow to look just right in the layering process because the full colour...
Matching colours accurately is a key component of botanical art, so why is it controversial? For decades I’ve taught accurate colour matching, first in an industrial setting to the staff of printing companies and, more recently in the past almost twenty years,...
Digital devices in botanical art is a somewhat controversial topic nowadays. Some won’t touch it with a ten-foot barge pole. I will; I feel strongly about it. Recently, an artist posted on social media to say that he had purchased all of my coloured pencil...
A New Year message I was recently reminded of an email I sent as a New Year message for botanical artists in 2019. The person who mentioned it said that she had come across it in her files and found it to be as inspiring now as it was then. This made me dig into my...
Schöner aus Herrnhut recently helped Karen Hooper explore composition in botanical art. Schöner aus Herrnhut is a German heirloom apple dating back to 1880. Apparently, someone found a single seedling in the Saxony town of Herrnhut. So explains former ER doctor and...
