How To Draw Plants: The Techniques Of Botanical Illustration

This comprehensive and authoritative handbook by an experienced botanical artist is intended for the people who ask those questions - who want to portray plants and flowers with botanical accuracy: artists seeking to extend their range, students of illustration wholly or partly devoted to botanical subjects, or amateurs with an interest in botany and natural history who want to record flowers that have given them pleasure. The author gives detailed advice on working in pencil, pen, scraper board, water-colour and gouache, and acrylics; on building up a drawing or painting by stages; on taking measurements and understanding plant structure; on collecting, handling and preserving plant material; and on the use of the hand lens and dissecting microscope. The accurate observation and the techniques that he advocates are equally applicable to the disciplined requirements of providing plates for the scientific press and to illustrations for more popular work or to drawing for pleasure. Essential botanical terms and information are fully explained and illustrated, and there is a glossary. Approximately 130 illustrations (ten in colour) include examples of the work of well-known artists of the past and a large number of diagrams and line drawings.

The best introductory book on the subject examines plant structures and the problems they present to illustrators, then discusses the artist's tools and how to use them: pencils, erasers, papers, brushes, watercolors, gouache, and acrylics.