I attended the workshop on 16th March with Lucy Smith where she showed us examples of the botanical illustrations she had produced for Kew Gardens and how she had illustrated a book on Palms which took over 10 years to publish.
She provided pre-drawn examples of a flower and viburnum, which we traced onto Bristol board to practice the techniques she used. Lucy explained and demonstrated the techniques she uses to obtain an accurate line drawing, how the plant material was arranged as a composition, ensuring that all parts of the plant were illustrated and any dissections were shown. Any line drawings were traced onto Bristol board Lucy explained that all drawings needed a definite and continuous line and advised us to go over the original line to make it definitive. A tonal drawing could then be completed. This was then ready for inking. Techniques for using the fine liners were demonstrated i.e. the use of the arm when drawing a long line and the lifting and landing technique. She also explained the use of the different sizes of pens and how a thinner or thicker line would show form and fine liners to shade in the drawing with the use of the stippling technique. For this style of illustration, she advised that less was more with stippling and the illustrations were quite minimal.
This was a fantastic workshop and very helpful and I was in awe of the illustrations she produces and how she could control the minimal amount of tone and stippling in the illustrations I found it was so easy to get carried away. Author – Sue Frost