Botanical Illustrations

Some recent botanical illustrations I did while traveling.

Let me know by email or comments if you are interested in seeing these as postcards or greeting cards!

Blackberries!

  Blackberry brambles everywhere. Constantly have to knock down the shoots that pop up all over the yard, and that's a prickly and tricky task. Even handling the sample for this drawing was difficult to manage without stabbing myself. Even the leaves have a wicked, spiny ridge of hooked thorns along the undersides.

Most of the flowers are long gone and well on their way to becoming very tart, lip-puckering blackberries (yummy in baked goods or jams though!), but I managed to scour the 6-foot tall hedges and find a lone holdout of fragile pink blossoms.

California Aster

Claire and I have been finding these down the path to the ravine across from our house. She likes to clip the sprays and take them home to put in water. I finally figured out the name of this little wildflower. It's an aster, from ancient Greek meaning "star". The butterflies love these, and I have to admit I'm rather partial to the periwinkle blue/purple color too!

Done with watercolor pencil. I'm enjoying doing these botanical illustrations, and having an actual specimen in front of me is so different from drawing and painting from photo references, which is what I do most of the time for paintings (if I need a reference). It's an exercise to my brain to match not just what colors will work for a composition, but what I see in front of me.

Nasturtiums

Experimenting with watercolor pencils, and an attempted foray into botanical illustration. I've always loved botanical illustrations, and I have this lovely set of watercolor pencils that need more playing with, and an even lovelier pot full of nasturtiums outside my front door. Last year, my friend gave me the pencil set, as well as a large watercolor moleskin, and it was really too nice to just use for scribbles and sketches. So, a year later I have finally found a use for it. I'll be doing more of these hopefully. After all, I have a whole book to fill up now.

A quicker sketch I did earlier that day, which was what prompted the more finished drawing above. I couldn't resist revisiting those bright golds and oranges and the patterns.