Botanical art

I'm back into the Domestika courses and have departed from just watercolours into a bit of botanical. I started this before Christmas, and it was fun, although I don't think this detailed realistic stuff is going to be my ongoing passion. Again, another amazingly talented Mexican artist, Paulina Macial Canela and lots of spanish that I don't understand. 

She had us doing kind of grisaille, where the pencil gives the depth and the watercolour wash just indicates the colour. And trying to do it with fine tip markers as well, and ink pens. With varying degrees of success! I had to copy her azaleas as I didn't have any in my garden.

There was also quite a lot of botanicalness - actually looking at plants and flowers and seeing how they are shaped. They are all different! I shouldn't be surprised but I am. It was fun to do the mushrooms, again in marker pen, which makes you bolder than a pencil. These aren't from life, I don't have exciting mushrooms.

She also had us do a table of all our colours and how they mix with all our other colours, which I kind of knew, but it was highly entertaining to slowly do this at the front of my sketchbook. And it's pretty. 

After the course was done I looked online for other botanical artists and there are so many and they are so amazing! I googled then freaked out so googled 'easy botanical drawing' to eliminate the ultra perfectionists. And copied a few of the simpler ones, as an exercise.