Groovy Link of the Month: ArtPlantae Today
Posted on 1 March 2010 | No responses
Who: Tana Marien is founder and administrator of the website.
What: ArtPlantae Today is a clearinghouse for news and information regarding botanical art/illustration, botany and science education in the US. In addition to the news updates, there are also interviews with participating artists, articles about botany, illustration, and science education, and finally, an online bookshop with specialty tomes.
Where: The site focuses on news, events and classes throughout the United States. Tana Marien is based in California. The URL is http://artplantaetoday.com/
When: The blog is updated twice a week—on Mondays and Thursdays.
How: WordPress blog and CMS.
Why: There are many websites and blogs devoted to the activities sponsored by individual botanic gardens and artists in the US, but a dearth of portal sites that provide an overview of current events in this field. ArtPlantae Today fills that niche.
Worldwide Sketch Crawl Day!
Posted on 27 February 2010 | No responses
Today is Worldwide Sketch Crawl Day.
Get together with a buddy or three and enjoy sketching the world around you! 
Botanical illustration courses at Rio’s Jardim Botânico
Posted on 26 February 2010 | 2 responses
Extension courses at Rio's Jardim Botânico in 2010
(Poster image courtesy of Paulo Ormindo and the Escola Nacional Botânica Tropical)
Paulo Ormindo at the Research Institute of the Rio de Janeiro Jardim Botânico emailed me this news update about the 2010 extension courses in botanical illustration offered at the Institute’s school. All classes are held at the school on Rua Pacheco Leão 2040 in the historical Solar da Imperatriz building. Classes are in Portuguese, but both Paulo Ormindo and Malena Barretto speak fluent English, if your language skills are lacking. Both instructors were Margaret Mee Fellows at Kew Gardens in London, spending a year studying and researching topics in botanical illustration.
Sign up today for the short course in botanical illustration drawing at the Escola Nacional Botânica beginning next week. In 2010, they will be offering two Saturday-only long courses, in addition to the semi-weekly long courses in drawing and watercolor. The drawing courses focus on graphite and pen-and-ink techniques and offer the opportunity to draw from live and preserved specimens in the institute’s collections, as well as time spent learning to use the microscope in drawing. The watercolor courses use live specimens and occasional day trips into the gardens themselves.
Current Project: Bromeliad and stippling technique
Posted on 24 February 2010 | No responses
Today I returned to the soil area at the roots of the bromeliad. To increase texture, I stippled the area with a mix of alizarin crimson, sepia and indigo, followed by more stippling with a sepia and indigo mix (with maybe a few touches of burnt sienna). To stipple is to make tiny dots or dabs on the surface of the painting with the brush. Think of stippling as pizzicato for the watercolor brush.
Here you can see the the tiny size of the brush I used to stipple:
Stippling to add texture with a very small brush
In the hot, breezy weather we’ve been having, this brush dries out fast!
Here is another view of the stippling:
A close-up of the stippled area
I think you can see that the stippling is much smaller and sharper on the left than the right. After stippling, I added some light washes, first in the indigo/sepia mix, then with burnt sienna toned down with a little sepia. This has darkened the value scale quite a bit. Here is today’s progress:
Botanical illustration of bromeliad, in progress
Now the roots need to be modelled and darkened in response.
Palette for Strelitzia
Posted on 23 February 2010 | No responses
Palette of colors and color mixtures used in Strelitzia watercolor.
This is the paper I used to mix colors for the Strelitzia illustration before applying paint to the picture itself.
I hadn’t been using ultramarine lately, but it really worked for the bright clean blues found in the flower. Using it again in the stalk not only matched the plant itself, but unified the composition. I am not sure if the red was cadmium red light, or vermilion—normally I find the cadmium reds to go brown in mixtures, but this one stayed true, so perhaps was actually vermilion.
I found myself stretching my color muscles a little bit on this small painting, using mixtures I hadn’t used in a while. It’s good to get out of a rut of unawareness!