Tomato study

 

This is the picture I've been working on. The plant is done in graphite, the tomato dissections and flowers in watercolour, and there is also a cross section of the flower.

 

Hope you like it!

 

 

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!

Sunography

Its not botanical illustration but it is crafty and botanical so I thought I would share this here.

A few months ago I won this Sunography kit as part of a goody bag at the Wildlife photographer of the Year Exhibition at the Natural History Museum.

With a sunny afternoon and not much else to do I decided to have a go.
The kit consists of 6 small pieces of light sensitive fabric. The idea is to use any objects to create a pattern on the fabric by leaving it in bright sunlight for 15 minutes. When you wash the fabric in cold water the areas that were exposed to sunlight change colour leaving a silhouette of the object on the fabric.

I picked various bits and pieces from the garden. The picture on the left shows the fabric as it is being developed and on the right the finished image.

This one is Nigella (Love-In-A-Mist) which is growing in abundance in the garden at the moment:

I think this one is a Calendula but I'm not entirely sure:

I did all six pieces of fabric that were included but a couple of them didn't turn out very well. I chose the best four pieces and sewed them together to make a panel to hang on the wall.

Hope you like it !

Tree of Plant Evolution

This is  for Paul's study wall.
The structure is based on a postcard from Kew showing the evolution of plants based on the APG III classification system.

Honeysuckle

Lonicera periclymenum

The honeysuckle in the garden finally flowered so I could paint it. This is for Laura :-)