Member Classes

Introduction to Botanical Art - Various Leaves

I teach botanical and insect illustration and through this experience I've learnt the problems that you might come up against when you first start out with watercolour. I will walk you through the whole process from beginning to end. We'll cover basic equipment required, setting up your specimen, sketching, tonal study, transferring the image to your watercolour paper, and then the real fun begins. We'll go through building up your painting from wet in wet, all the way to dry brushto add those final details at the end. Along the way I'll include lots of tips and techniques to help you learn to paint Eucalyptus leaves, and these techniques can be applied to other subjects.

Hi Mark!!

A Week with Işık Güner in Transylvania

POD is a spacious botanical art studio filled with north light. It sits in the grounds of a private house in Copsa Mare, a tiny farming village in southern Transylvania. The village is in the middle of tens of thousands of hectares of oak and beech forest, interspersed with traditional farm grasslands exceptionally rich in flora & fauna. Classes are limited to just 5 students. Non-painting partners are welcome to join the trip. Guided by leading botanical illustrators & local botanical knowledge, students spend a week observing, sketching & painting seasonal wild plants growing in the open wood pastures above Copşa Mare. Periods of intensive study at your desk are balanced with fieldwork in this exceptional landscape, home to over 1000 plant species & 600 butterfly and moth species. During your stay, you may examine the Transylvania Florilegium, with 124 illustrations of local plants drawn by 40 botanical artists, each accompanied by the botanist John Akeroyd's informative text. All meals are eaten together at home, with food grown & prepared by your hosts: Lots of vegetables, buffalo milk & cream, home cured meats, sheep and goat cheese, even our own home ground flours & corn meal! You all stay with your hosts, James & Rachel de Candole.

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In this tutorial we will deconstruct the hand's own anatomy and indeed demystify it, so that when you look at a hand for reference, you can make sense of it as a group of simple forms, easy to put together.

Here’s a quick look at the bone structure of the hand (left). In blue, the eight carpal bones, in purple, the five metacarpal bones, and in pink, the 14 phalanges.

As many of these bones cannot move at all, we can simplify the basic structure of the hand: the diagram on the right is all you really need to remember.

1. The virtual extension of the inner line of the wrist separates the thumb from the fingers. A small tendon line may mark the junction of wrist and hand.
2. When fingers are close together as above, the thumb tucks a bit under the palm and is partially hidden.
3. The FF or RF as sometimes almost as long as the MF.
4. The folds that mark the knuckles are elliptical or like parenthesis, but when the hand is flat as above they are not pronounced (unless someone has protruding knuckles, which happens on much-labored hands) and can be drawn as mere dimples.
5. The folds of the finger joints show elliptically on the back side, but they fade when the fingers are bent. They show as parallel lines on the palm side, but they are more pronounced at the lower joint – typically you wouldn't use two lines for the upper joints.
6. From the back, the lines of the fingers extend down to the limit of the palm, which makes the fingers look longer from the back.
7. From the inside, the lines are shorter because the top of the palm is padded, so the fingers look shorter on the palm side. 
8. The lines of the fingers end in are drag lines (these short horizontal dashes) on both sides, and on both sides these drag lines all point away from the MF.

Note also, in the diagram above, how the fingernails are not drawn fully but indicated in a subtle way appropriate to the overall level of detailing (which is rather higher than necessary, for purposes of showing all the lines). The smaller the hand you're drawing, the less detail you want in it, unless you want it to look old.

I didn't mention the lines of the hand above, so let's take a look at them closely here:

Human Anatomy Fundamentals: Basic Body Proportions

We’re going to build up this skill from the ground up, in the same order as the drawing process, starting with a simplified body drawing skeleton (the basic figure or stick figure), moving on to the volumes of muscle structure, and then finally the details of each part of the body and face.

The first fundamental skills to acquire are human proportions drawing techniques. And we’re going to be practicing with this basic figure for a while to become familiar not only with the conventional "ideal proportions", but also with the way they vary with gender, age, and even ethnic background.

If you're drawing digitally, perhaps you want your work to look as if it's created with pencil and paper. If this is the case, may we recommend one of the many Photoshop brush sets available on GraphicRiver, including this Classic Art Brush Pack.

Teach you Advanced Drawing of All Things Botanical