"May I use photos?"
"Should I use a lamp or natural daylight?"
"Should I always draw from alive specimens?"
These are commons questions within the universe of Botanical Illustration, and one of the students in my online classes, Prerna Gupta from India, asked me to help her with some very specific concerns. I answered her in detail and I think these tips might be helpful for many people. I hope you enjoy it.
Question: So far for my botanical art, I always try to get my hands on live specimens which I then take a LOT of photos of to use later. In the summer heat of India, specimens barely stay usable for a couple of hours so I inevitably end up relying on photos. Time and again I have been told and have also read that working from live specimens is the most desirable but I find that nearly impossible to do (unless it is a subject like a dry leaf/fruit/vegetable which can still survive for a few days). So, my question is, how do professional botanical artists work around this problem, especially when drawing flowers etc which tend to wilt quickly?
Answer: Yes, it's desirable that we draw from alive specimens whenever possible. However, the strict botanical scientific illustration is most of the time done from dry specimens preserved in the herbarium. So we have to rehydrate parts of the plant, and often we have to "invent" the alive form since the rehydrated structures may be dramatically distorted.
I always reconstruct the overview of the habit* with the form the plant has when alive (not all illustrators do that and many prefer to draw the plant exactly as it is fixed on the herbarium board). But of course this "invention" must be thoroughly faithful to the measurements we do, hence we stick to the correct dimensions of structures, and to how they'll change after we redraw the whole plant in a perspective that will shorten some dimensions while preserving others.
We invent the form based on experience in the field, knowledge of akin species, or on photos taken by the researchers (or else our own photos, when available). In my case, I do prefer drawing in the field or outdoors whenever I can, right where the plant is growing, but unfortunately this is not frequent.
If the plant is in the ground (not in a vase), I draw it right there. I choose one among the best branches (the one which is in a good position and also under a good illumination), and I try to sketch the shadows at the moment of the day in which they are the most adequate or beautiful. I may have some 30 to 60 minutes (or even much more) to make a sketch before the shadows change too much.
Then I'll go on working on that sketch, sticking to the form I have already drawn but being inspired by the light I continue to see on the plant. Although the form and position of shadows keep changing, I still can appreciate and depict the correct tone and contrast they display. If the plant is in a vase, it's all quite simpler because as the sun moves I aim to move as well to maintain the same configuration of light and shadows.
Eventually, we have to cut a branch out of the plant and preserve it in a jar with water. Some plants may endure several days in that condition, keeping the same alive posture, providing us with enough time even to finish a good illustration. But some other plants will dry out very fast, so we have to come up with strategies to sort out our challenge.
Sometimes the flower may be the first to wilt down, so we rush to draw it and sketch its shadows and or its colors. Then we quickly draw the leaves before they follow up and wilt down too, and it's quite common that older leaves go first. In some plants, the colors of leaves change, but their form, light and shade may remain quite the same, so we can study colors first and work on the form afterward.
It's all about strategy and priorities. As the plant wilts down entirely, I usually continue my drawing based on the flowers and leaves that I can see in the alive plant. So now the drawing is already done, and if my original subject has faded away, all I need is to find other flowers and leaves that are in positions alike, and under illumination also alike. If there is for example a cast shadow over some leaves in my drawing, I simulate this in the reality using another leaf or branch to cover the light. This is a solution that allows us to be quite loyal to the natural light and the colors we see in the alive plant.
Once I drew and painted a plant directly in the field. Among several trees, I chose the best one regarding its qualities and its position in relation to the sunlight (see the images of the post). The sun would rise up behind me and begin to illuminate the branches around 7:30 am. I had then some three hours to paint before the light would change too dramatically. For the sun goes up on a trajectory that may keep the light more or less consistent (at least in some seasons of the year), and depending on the position of the plant, that will be helpful.
I went there to paint for several days, maybe one week, and since my focus was on new leaves that were growing larger very quickly, I had a lot of challenges to overcome. Thus I made all I could in the field and when the leaves grew larger, became more mature, and even changed colors, I stayed home and finished the painting by memory only, since I had already studied and sketched all the colors that I had observed in the field (some parts of the painting were even almost finished in the field, so I had good samples to rely on).
Of course, we can and should use photos all the time to help us whenever we need them. But we do have to take into account the fact that the photo doesn't depict what the human eye sees. The subtle tonal differences, mainly within the shadowed area, can practically disappear in photos and the contrast is drastically altered sometimes.
So we have to take MANY photos, some of them attempting to faithfully capture the lighted area, some others attempting to faithfully capture the shadowed area. Also, the colors may be dramatically distorted, thus in these days of mobile phones with amazing editing options, we can and should edit the photos while looking at the flower to try and depict the colors as faithfully as possible.
Regarding light and shadow, no matter how good is the editing program, we probably won't be capable of making an edition to the point of correcting, in one unique photo, all the distortions that happen.
Also, when we have only one or two photos provided by the researcher who commissioned the work, we have to illustrate and correct the light and shade by relying on memory and experience, or maybe trying to figure it all out by observing nature and looking for similar subjects. In such a case though, regarding colors, we'll have to be faithful to the color we see in the photo, as we have no means to guess how distorted it was by the photography process.
Question: Also, I wanted to know how you set up the light for your subjects. Do you make use of natural light? I find that natural light gives the most pleasing tonal contrasts but natural light can also be so fickle, changing from hour to hour and day to day. If you use a lamp as the light source, don't you end up getting very harsh contrasts? How to work around that? So even in this case, I end up using the photos that I take of a subject using natural light. I do want to work on developing my skill to work from live specimens but these two obstacles are tripping me up.
Answer: I do prefer using natural light, and when I draw indoors I prefer the light that enters through a window, preferably the light from the blue or cloudy sky with no direct sunlight, as this light will remain approximately the same throughout most of the day. Even when drawing outdoors, it's always possible to find a shadowed place where the light is more or less consistent and won't change throughout the day.
When I use lamps, I need a lamp that won't distort colors. Incandescent lamps are yellowish and can pale down the colors dramatically. So I use the fluorescent lamp from Philips which is called "daylight extra" (in Portuguese "luz do dia extra"). It's made in China. But the last time I purchased one of those was more than a decade ago (it still works) and I don't even know whether or not they are still manufactured.
When I decide to work entirely indoors, I use to associate this lamp with a dichroic lamp in an effort to reproduce either the sunlight and the light of the sky over an object. Because when the plant is outdoors, there'll be light coming from all sides, whereas indoors there'll be a lot of dim surfaces - there are walls, the ceiling, and none of these is a light source. That's why contrasts are harsh when we use just a single lamp. The fluorescent light strategically positioned thus can reduce the dimmish effect of the overall dark room.
The Philips fluorescent lamp (extra daylight) definitely is the best I found so far in preserving the colors exactly as they look when under the daylight. When compared to other fluorescent lamps by putting them all side by side, you notice that this specific lamp tends very subtly to a warm and rosy white, whereas the other ones are bluish or yellowish-white.
Despite what common sense could suppose, the bluish lamp won't simulate a good blue-sky illumination because this lamp is not actually blue, but only a cold white (which by the way makes the colors acquire a preposterously artificial hue). So we need that warmer white coming from a good lamp in order to try and simulate at least a kind of cloudy-sky light.
When associated with the dichroic lamp though, the faithful simulation can be screwed, thus we have to be careful because the dichroic lamp is yellowish and tends to pale down the colors too. We can then place this lamp a bit further away, or avoid spotting it directly onto the subject etc. As you see, we have to go through trial and error until we find the ideal strategy to depict the plant.
* "habit" is the botanical term that refers to the way the plant is seen in nature, either in an overall view or in close-up. In illustrations, the habit may be e.g. an entire tree and/or an isolated branch with all its elements.
Illustration: Pseudobombax longiflorum. Acrylic on gessoed Canvas Paper (Canson Figueras), 20 x 15cm, year 2004.
