Botanical Sketchbooking: A Meditative Approach

Overview

“Here you will use black fineliner for the contour drawing without any previous construction. We will start directly with fineliner from the foreground, the closest part of the plant. You need to visualise first your composition to be sure it will fit in your page. Then, you will project the line you will draw on the paper. Your line must be confident and regular, avoid "hairy lines". If a line turns wrong, don’t try to save it, go for the next one. Once you draw one leaf, continue with the next one, comparing scale, angles and shape.Your first element will be your scale for the all drawing. For now, we only focus on the contour. We are not using etching for the value or shades. This will be done afterwhile with the color. This is to me the most meditative part of the process, when you depict every leaf, very precisely, slowly, spending half of the time looking at the plant. You need to relax. If you get tired from so much concentration, you can take a break and follow on the next day. No hurries, your model is very patient… ”

In this video lesson Lapin addresses the topic: Line Techniques: Drawing Leaf by Leaf, which is part of the Domestika online course: Botanical Sketchbooking: A Meditative Approach. Slow down and connect with nature by learning how to illustrate plants and flowers using watercolors.

Partial transcription of the video

“Line Techniques II: Drawing Leaf by Leaf In this lesson, we will work on the quality of line, how to work with a fine liner much thinner than the one we used before. And to describe these plants, describing each leaf one by one, to be very attentive to the rhythm, the different shapes, the angles and to describe as clearly as you can, without any hairy lines. If one line is wrong, just pass it to the next one. We will start with this small plant here, which has this flower shape you remember from before. But from where I am, I get a very different, again, representation it's super organic, ...”

This transcript is automatically generated, so it may contain mistakes.

Course summary for: Botanical Sketchbooking: A Meditative Approach

• Level: Beginner
• 98% positive reviews (1301)
• 61393 students
• 4 units
• 24 lessons (5h 28m)
• 5 downloads

• Category

  Illustration

• Software

  Adobe Photoshop

• Areas

  Botanical Illustration, Drawing, Sketchbook, Sketching, Traditional illustration, Watercolor Painting