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Practice Sketching Seasons: Winter
The Practice of Botanical Drawing started as a year-long Challenge, prompting students to track a tree or woody shrub of their choice through all its stages for a year. The final product becomes a “Sketchbook of the Seasons,” with color and tonal drawings, herbarium components, and journal documentation from one or two trees and or … Continued
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Listen... with your eyes
As artists, we are all familiar with the feeling of overwhelm that arises upon first look at a subject beside the vastness of a blank page. How will we capture the innate beauty that we see before us? Before you start drawing, take a moment to observe, absorb, and process the sensory information you’re receiving … Continued
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Practicing Perspective
Check out some of our helpful drawing tips regarding perspective that we teach in our course, The Practice of Botanical Drawing! Choosing a View Look at a flower from various views and draw some practice rough sketches to choose a view that you will draw. It is good practice to measure and draw three … Continued
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Draw Winter! Botanical inspiration around the globe
Winter has begun! We love following nature all year long and noticing the differences in each season. If winter is cold where you are, it may be difficult to find live subjects. Now is a great time to draw things that will not wilt or decay, like branches, nuts, seeds, and pods. Looking for inspiration? … Continued
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The Joy of Botanical Drawing is the Best Colored Pencil Drawing Book of All Time!
“A gorgeous, easy-to-follow, and inspiring guide to stunningly realistic botanical drawing that covers everything you need to draw our natural world. Achieve amazingly realistic and vibrant botanical illustrations, from flowers so dazzling you feel as if you might be able to smell them, to tomatoes that look as if they’ve just been picked from the … Continued
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Receiving nature's gifts and giving back
The living world provides us with so much – oxygen, beauty, nutrition, inspiration… what can we, as botanical artists, give in return? Our gift is our time, our focused attention, our love. There is a reason that advertisers vie for our attention: they know that our time is our most valuable asset. Making the conscious … Continued
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Wendy's Art Exhibited
Hash 3928 Main Street | Stone Ridge, NY 12484 Open Tuesday-Saturday 7:00am-2:30pm & Sunday 7:00am-11:30am Wendy has been drawing plants for 20 years. Her original drawings and paintings are life-size, which means they are often very small. She likes to enlarge them so the details that we might not otherwise notice become visible. The enlarged … Continued
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The Art of Good Food: Botanical Recipe Composition Celebration
Between September and November 2021, we hosted the Botanical Recipe Composition Project. In this workshop, we celebrated our love for botanical illustrations, hand-lettering, and of course, food! This was our first “long-term” workshop, and over a few months, we met several times to learn some new tricks and work on our projects together. It was … Continued
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Notice subtle changes in nature as the seasons progress
Consider breaking free from the news cycle and tuning in to the subtleties of nature. Walk outside your door, and notice small changes in the environment around you. Is the grass a little greener? Duller? Did a familiar plant just start to flower? Are there new seeds or pods along the ground? When you are … Continued
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Practice Patience
Breathe. Think for a moment about the timeline of nature. Imagine a natural process: seed growth, blooming flowers, decomposition. Does it happen quickly? Imagine a flower, opening in the morning, not worried or stressed about whether a pollinator will come; it patiently, beautifully, waits. It cannot hurry up, cannot rush the process. If a pollinator … Continued
