“Coffee at the Alcove” by Karen Winters

Here’s a brief tutorial from Karen Winters (www.karenwinters.com/kblog). She sketched the tree in pencil (while her hubby queue for coffee, hence the title of her post) then digitially painted it in layers using Photoshop.

I’ve created a grad from green to brown, pulled back the opacity to 50%, and set the grad to multiply…

… I made a composite of the previous layers and put it on a fresh layer. Then I added new layers and painted some foliage where it made sense. There are three layers of leaves, in varying opacity and color, to suggest volume and depth. I also painted a little color on the trunk.

Check out her blog post for details on how it was done.

“Green Peas” by Mieke Roth

I learnt about Mieke Roth’s work over at the BotanicalArt mailing list. He She shared one of his recent work done with gouache (otherwise known as “poster paints”).

I emailed him her to ask if he she had images to show how the work progressed from the start till finish, and Mieke very kindly directed me to her site (in Dutch).

Mieke also added:

Normally I do scan my illustrations along the way, I like to see such a process myself also. I did one for the green pea and placed it on my Dutch blog (www.volkskrantblog.nl/bericht/46762). The comments are in Dutch, but the images explain themselves I think. I changed my routine between the green pea and the winged bean in the fact that with the winged bean I made all the under painting in one go, while with the green pea I started by painting the complete right flower and worked my way around the illustration. The change in work style has a reason: the winged bean is too complicated to do it like I did with the green pea: along the way all the pencil lines would have gone 😉

If you don’t read Dutch, you can do a translation of the blog by using a service like Babelfish (babelfish.altavista.com). Translations are not perfect though. For instance, it translates the word “blog” as “web-unwieldly“, LOL!

BotanicalArtistry.com

Here’s another website devoted to Botanical Art (www.botanicalartistry.com):

BotanicalArtistry.com is a resource for botanical artists and lovers of botanical art. It contains information on all kinds of botanical art – painting, illustration and prints.

BotanicalArtistry.com was set up as an information source for botanical artists and lovers of botanical art and flower painting. [From the About Page]

Check out their Image gallery and their Flickr page. I counted 24 members listed, including the administrator. The website also has a site feed (www.botanicalartistry.com/rss.xml) which you can subscribe if you’re interested in updates delivered to your reader (if you’re new to RSS and Blogs, I’ve got a previous post that you might find useful).

Site information last assessed on 30 Apr 2006

More photos from Poesie

More photos, from one of my favourite photographers, Poesie. Here’s two from a recent set (if I had to choose my favourites from her set, I’ll basically be creating a mirror site!):