Botanical Painting Diploma Course(D9)

Tutored by Sandrine Maugy

Course Overview
This is comprehensive course for people interested in the art of painting flowers and plants. The course is suitable for beginners and more experienced artists: the first study units contain some drawing exercises that the beginners will find essential before moving on to more advanced units. Improvers can use these exercises to practice and refresh their skills. The course uses many step-by-step illustrations to guide you through the drawing and painting techniques required for this subject. It teaches a layered watercolour technique from basics, as well as tonal drawing and pen and ink drawing.

An important part of botanical art is the design of the illustration, to ensure you have a well balanced painting. To help you discover the fundamentals of good design several illustrations are used as examples, with many aspects of good design, such as lighting and shadows, being discussed. To complete the course advice is given on how to collect and use reference material.

The course is highly illustrated and includes a brief look at the historical importance of Botanical Illustration. In order to represent plants and flowers you need an understanding of plant anatomy, and so the different types of plant and flower structures are considered.

Course Prices
Please visit our 'Prices and Buy Now' page to view the course prices and to purchase your course. UK residents can purchase courses on this page via instalments, please scroll down to the relevant section to pay a deposit.

Critiques
If you have scanning / photography facilities, students are able to upload their artwork to the Artwork Submission Area on our website. Each student is given a unique username and password on enrolment for their own private section in this area. Students can upload their artwork to this area for the tutor to collect and critique. The tutor will then upload feedback for the student to download or read.

Critiques via Regular Mail
If you do not have any facilities to upload your artwork, you can send your work in the normal way to the tutors centre and receive your artwork back with your critique. It is essential you label all packages/artwork your student number.

Support
All our courses are written to be complete in themselves. However we realise that students may appreciate being able to get clarification about various things as they work through their programme as well wanting reassurance that they are putting techniques into practice effectively. The tutors provide the technical support to deal with relevant queries.

Most courses have their own dedicated Tutor. The tutor keeps the course up to date and relevant to today's students. They are available to the individual student for advice and encouragement. Each course has regular exercises and assignments that are constructed in such a way as to give the student the opportunity to practice the techniques learnt on the course and to test themselves as they go along. The student is encouraged to submit the assignment work to the college for the tutor to critique. The student's work will be returned together with the tutor's personal critique. On many courses the assignment work may be suitable for inclusion in a student's Portfolio of Work that could be very useful later. The college will use the assignments submitted as the basis for any award of a letter, certificate or diploma.

Duration
The expected duration of this course is approximately 1 year although the college allows students up to two years to complete their studies.

Overview
This course is suitable for students with previous experience in drawing and painting. The following is an overview of some of the areas that are covered in the course.

Samples pages from this course
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Samples from the course

Testimonials from students

"Thank you for an interesting course, which has helped me in a number of areas, not least of all in understanding watercolour better." Isabelle - (Botanical Illustration)