Botanical Illustration 1 Certificate Course
Course Artist and writer Lynette Conway
Course overview
This is an introduction to the art of painting flowers and plants. It is an ideal course for beginners as it takes you through the basic techniques of drawing and painting in this specialised area. 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.
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.
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.
Critiques
Lynette provides either written critiques via email, critiques on cassette tape or written critiques via regular mail
Critiques via email
If you have scanning facilities, students are able to upload their artwork to the Admin Centre, from our students administration area. Each student will need to obtain a username and password to this area, if you do not currently have the details please email us. The form consists of browse buttons to attach your work, and a comments box where you can type a letter to Lynette explaining how you got on with your artwork.
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 a written critique or tape.
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 Administration Centre is available seven days a week and the Course Artist provides the technical support to deal with relevant queries.
Most courses have their own dedicated Course Artist. The Course Artist 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 Course Artist to critique. The student's work will be returned together with the Course Artist'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 Diploma or Certificate. The duration of this course is aproximatly 6 months.
