Product Description

Christina Brodie draws on her extensive experience as a botanical art teacher in compiling this complete course on drawing and painting plants. Clear step-by-step instructions show how to accurately render a wide range of plants and plant parts - from flowers, fruits, and seeds through leaves, stems, bark, and roots to fungi, ferns, mosses, and seaweeds. Christina Brodie's concise text and beautiful, detailed examples illustrate techniques for various media, including pencil, ink, watercolor, gouache, acrylics, and scraper board. This highly practical manual offers a complete course of instruction in basic and advanced techniques of botanical illustration, and is suitable for beginning artists and journal keepers as well as teachers and professional illustrators.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #310151 in Books
• Published on: 2007-01-01
• Format: Illustrated
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 144 pages

From Booklist
Brodie's holistic, comprehensive approach blends drawing and painting techniques with botanical terminology and suggestions for gathering plant material. Beginning with the basics of classification and using scientific taxonomy as the underpinning of her instructional scheme, British author Brodie presents lessons in drawing and watercolor technique emphasizing the use of basic shapes, a special chart illustrating color mixing to create a large range of greens, and rendering flowers, fruits, seeds, leaves, stems, roots, trees, fungi, and flowerless plants such as ferns and algae via understanding their structure and function. Additional painting media include gouache, acrylics, and ink. This user-friendly guide for artists of all levels includes illustrations demonstrating techniques that include magnification and drawing to scale. Whitney Scott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
" this does not compromise or cut corners and it's refreshing in an age when books are increasingly becoming commodities that there is still someone out there who is prepared to go the extra mile to produce books for the serious student." Artbookreview.net (4th October 2006) "A good mix of inspiration and education, with gorgeous illustrations, as you might expect." Publishing News (4th August 2006) 'This new and authoritative book is a welcome change of direction For the artistic plant lover, it's a real treat.' The Artist (April 2006)

Review
"Brodie's holistic, comprehensive approach blends drawing and painting techniques with botanical terminology, presentation skills, and suggestions for gathering plant material. Thsi user-friendly guide for artists of all levels with a botanical interest includes many illustrations demonstrating techniques that include magnification and drawing to scale." Whitney Scott, Booklist

Customer Reviews

Great Illustrations and Information
The book consist of detailed botanical illustrations of flowers, plants, trees, vines, leaves and mushrooms. I bought this book so I could get an inspiration for my graphic design work and the book almost have it. It shows the details of tree barks and stems, cross section of flowers, roots and bulbs. If only it covered more fruits like berries and strawberries it could have been better. Since I prefer color illustrations, I wasn't so crazy about the pen & ink drawings. I really like the fern illustrations on page 115. Overall, this is a great book.

Probably better for someone who knows a bit about drawing and painting already
While the initial pages, with their detailed, beginner level descriptions of materials and media suggested to me that this would be a great introduction to drawing and painting plants for a complete novice, I found that I was completely lost after just a few pages.

My goal was to be able to illustrate my own garden notebook with quick sketches of the plants growing there. This would be a nice way of documenting the development of my garden plants, and especially the onset and progress of diseases, pests, weather damage and sometimes even the food produced in my garden. Alas while there may be a book that would help me with that, this one wasn't it.

However, it is a beautifully designed book, and it contains wonderful information for the would be botanist. The information and drawings are exactly what students of plants need to know to use a key to identify and classify plants in the field.