Where I work

I thought you might like to have a little peek at my drawing desk, and also a little preview of what I have been working on this week. I'll share that work with you in more detail later on.

My desk is in a lovely little cubby hole and my wonderful daylight lamp makes working in the evening and during winter much easier. What you can't see in this photo is the postcards which I have along the left hand side, showing inspiring pieces of botanical art. The most recent ones I have there are Rachel Peddder-Smith's Herbarium Specimen Painting.

Kenyan legume pod

Here is a quick sketch I did while travelling in Kenya over New Year. Its a pod from a tree that was growing in the grounds of the place we stayed near Mombasa.

It also had these lovely red and yellow flowers: 

A milestone in my botanical illustration journey

When a botanist discovers a new species of plant, they must publish a description in scientific literature.

Earlier this year I was asked by Alex Monro at the Natural History Museum to illustrate three new species of Pilea for a paper he was publishing describing these new species.

This paper has just been published in the journal Phytokeys and you can see my illustrations for the very first time in a real scientific journal! The full article can be found here.

I learned a huge amount doing these illustrations. I worked from dry herbarium specimens and used a dissecting microscope to see the smallest details. The flowers of these species are tiny - just a few mm across, and I had to boil the dried flowers in water so that they would open up so that I could see their structures.

These aren't the most obviously pretty plants, but seeing the microscopic features of a plant is always fascinating.

I'm looking forward to doing more illustrations in 2013, and will try and post as often as I can to share what I am working on.

Happy New Year!