Botanicals

In the parttime course catalogue for St. Lawrence College, winter semester, I saw that my favourite art teacher was giving a course on watercolour botanicals.  (Unless I know someone doesn't mind having their name mentioned in a public blog, I won't publish it.)   At any rate, got me signed up, and have been enjoying the course.  Our first assignment was doing a study on the parts of a flower, which is a good review for me, couldn't remember some of them.  Having to draw, paint and label helps make it "stick" a little better, and makes you pay attention to shapes and structures.  This first one is from a handout we were given, I drew it freehand.  (140 lb coldpress watercolour paper.)

This exercise got me looking through some of my field guides, and I soon discovered there were other types of flowers and more labels for the parts, so I did another study.   This one was on hotpress paper, drawn in pencil and outlined in ink, painted in with watercolour.  For these types of studies I'm putting reference notes and "for personal educational use only" since it is copied from some artists' copyrighted artwork.  Also, it is annoying when I look back through my collection of artwork and can't remember where I got the reference image from, my photo or some publication?  Now if it's not my original image it's going to have the obligatory disclaimers.