Illustration plus botanical workshops

– Freehand and digital illustration
– Botanical workshops
– Photography to explore ideas

I also find drawing invaluable for making sense of the character of the landscape around me. For example, I made several studies of different trees and vistas in Bellever Forest, Dartmoor. The process of drawing helped me to capture both the feel of the place as well as the details that are essential in identifying a specific tree.

I’m also comfortable using digital drawing tools, and give some examples I have created for clients.

The first illustration appears in ‘Embedded’ (2014) Andy Hughes, Gyre: The Plastic Ocean, Anchorage Museum, Rasmuson Center, Alaska: Booth Clibborn Editions. The second image was drawn entirely on the computer but did mash-up some existing open-source vector assets for the Right Place Right Tree project. The next image is a hybrid Goat Willow and is illustrated in A Coming of Age: Celebrating 18 Years of Botanical Painting for the Eden Project. The photographic illustration is currently part of a zine I’m developing in connection to other published work connected to a past project called Home of Springs, Trengwainton. The last illustrations are really for viewing small scale they are for an App called SOS MANGROVE – In Response to MV Wakashio Oil Spill for the NGO Reef Conservation in Mauritius.

Friends of the Towans Art Club 

I enjoy running botanical drawing workshops with families, and in 2022 artist Hilary Gibson and I worked with Dynamic Dunescapes and Friends of the Towans, Cornwall to encourage interaction between people and dune environments through the medium of drawing landscapes and painting plants. This work will continue into 2023 and beyond.

As part of the sessions, I created pop-up outdoor studios for families with children where they could try out professional artists’ materials and use tools I’d made for exploring plants close-up in a fun way. I believe everyone has the ability to draw and play, and these workshops opened everyone’s eyes to the wonder of the dunes.

“In any environment, both the degree of inventiveness and creativity, and the possibility of discovery, are directly proportional to the number and kind of variables in it.” Simon Nicholson, British Fine Artist.