Sunday, August 11, 2013

Botany for Botanical Artists

Cydonia oblonga (Quince) 
By Franz Eugen Köhler
Köhler's Medizinal-Pflanzen
I've been making a new website today - about Botany for Botanical Artists.

As I noted in my Interviews with RHS Botanical Art Gold Medal Winners at this year's RHS Botanical Art Exhibition - painting a nice painting is not enough!
Painting flowers nicely isn't enough. There's a clear and strong botanical science theme running through the stories of many of the new Gold Medal Winners. Dissection and the portrayal of the complete plant and life cycle should be high on the agenda of any aspiring Gold Medal winner

The botanical science theme for me essentially means telling the life story of a plant and demonstrating all its relevant parts - on one sheet of paper.

Following the exhibition, I'd noticed that there seems to be a lack of websites with a focus on the topic of botanical art for artists.  On the other hand there's quite a lot of information on the Internet and there are also very good books.

Botany for Botanical Artists covers books providing advice on
  • drawing the shapes and parts of plants correctly and so they demonstrate correct plant morphology
  • Botanical Latin and the correct terms for naming the different parts of plants
PLUS
  • places where you can learn more about analytical botanical ans scientific illustration for artists (still developing this section)
AND
  • lists of national botanical networks
  • lists of botanical gardens in different countries (I've still got to transfer the USA, Australasia and Asia)
  • lists of arboreta around the world

Most of the website involved transferring content from one website to another.  I started to develop content on my Botanical Art - Resources for Artists website and then realised it was getting a bit hefty.

Any suggestions as to useful additions will be much appreciated

3 comments:

  1. Hi Katherine,

    The Institute of Analytical Plant Illustration website and facebook page might be useful links to include:
    https://www.facebook.com/pages/Institute-for-Analytical-Plant-Illustration/114976001960832

    http://iapi.org.uk/
    The news and events section also lists botany for botanical artists courses.

    Botanic Gardens Conservation International may help your lists of botanic Gardens in various different countries http://www.bgci.org/garden_search.php

    And finally, the International Plant Names Index http://www.ipni.org/ is really useful for checking spellings of botanical names.

    I hope some of these links are useful to you. Sorry if you were aware of a lot of them already!

    Looking forward to seeing the website :-)

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  2. They are - for which thanks - and actually some of them are already included. :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Fabulous idea! I am looking forward to it too!

    ReplyDelete

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