Drawing and Painting Botanicals for Artists by Karen Kluglein

Drawing and Painting Botanicals for Artists by Karen Kluglein ISBN-13: 9781631598579 Paperback: 144 pages Publisher: Rockport Publishers Released: June 16th 2020

Source: ebook review copy from the publisher through NetGalley.

Book Description, Modified from Goodreads:
In Drawing and Painting Botanicals for Artists, eminent botanical artist and veteran workshop instructor Karen Kluglein reveals her secrets for rendering leaves, flowers, berries, and branches both accurately and beautifully. The book begins with a brief history of the art form, followed by guidance on developing observational skills for this genre, key botanical terms and concepts, and the differences among botanical illustration, botanical art, and flower painting. The chapters that follow offer detailed guidance and demonstrations for drawing and painting botanicals in a variety of mediums:

Drawing. Explore loose gestural drawing, precise measuring and rendering, and working from photographs with graphite, colored pencil, finepoint markers, pen and ink, and silverpoint.

Painting. Master color mixing, washes, layering, gradations, values, and adding details in watercolor, gouache, and acrylic, plus guidance on adding “personality” to your work and knowing when a painting is done.


My Review:
Drawing and Painting Botanicals for Artists focused on how to draw or paint botanicals. For a book "for artists," she spent a lot of time describing the basic materials, tools, terms, and techniques needed for the different mediums – graphite pencils, colored pencils, fine point markers, silverpoint, watercolor, and gouache. She then provided step-by-step instruction on how to accurately draw or paint leaves, flowers and petals, fruits and berries, stems and branches. The instruction focused a lot on what things to look at and consider when trying to accurately replicate the live plant or a plant in a photograph. Overall, I'd recommend this book to those wanting to learn how to or improve their realistic, botanical drawings or paintings.


If you've read this book, what do you think about it? I'd be honored if you wrote your own opinion of the book in the comments.