Creating Botanical Art: Learn to Draw and Paint Flowers and Plants in the Style of the Great Masters

Artists can create elegant botanical art in the style of great masters with this comprehensive, full-color guide.

Botanical illustration lies somewhere between science and art with its desire to present an accurate recreation of the flower or plant in question and still retain the beauty of a work of art. In this new guide, Françoise Balsan takes inspiration from recreating work by artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, Nicolas Robert, Georg Dionysius Ehret and Pierre-Joseph Redouté.

Working through the book, readers can follow clear instructions and step-by-step illustrations all created by the author herself to produce wonderful artworks in a variety of media, whether it be pencil, chalk or watercolors. Alongside the projects, there are handy tips about making marks on the paper and how to recreate various effects as well as developing a color wheel and records to help you remember how to reproduce various shades of color.

With careful attention to details, users of this book will be able to produce skillful works of art that can grace any home.

Françoise Balsan graduated with a degree in Art History from the École du Louvre and the Sorbonne (Paris IV), and specialized in botanical watercolor. After first copying oil paintings, she switched to watercolor. Balsan considers Nicolas Robert, Claude Aubriet, Maria Sibylla Merian and Pierre-Joseph Redouté to be masters of the genre. The methods demonstrated by Balsan in this book are based on a thorough study of the techniques used by various masters of botanic art. Françoise continues to teach classes in botanical watercolor painting and lives in the south of France.