This past Wednesday I had the great pleasure of running the first of two workshops with the Botanical Illustrators group at the Cranbourne Royal Botanic Gardens. This group meet every first and third Wednesday of the month in the Elliot Centre at Cranbourne and are an integral part of the Friends of the RGB.
The theme for this two day workshop is 'Nuts About Graphite' and is exploring all the different ways and techniques to use graphite pencils in your botanical drawing. Our subject is 'nuts and cones' - primarily things like Banksia, Hakea, Casuarina, etc - but no eucalyptus or gum nuts due to the danger of bringing the Myrtle Rust fungus into the gardens. It was a full class of 12 which is great to see - and although it was a little squishy room-wise, everyone gets on well and are wonderful artist friends.
We began with a series of basic exercises in different graphite techniques including both 'dry' graphite and water soluble graphite. I did a little demonstration work to show how these can work together:
'Coastal Banksia' Demonstration in 4B w/s graphite, Graphitint and graphite pencils on Art Spectrum 300gsm hot press paper.
by Linda Weil ©2022
From there we moved onto discussion of our subject, composition and planning. To scale planning sketches were created in our workbooks at A4 size to be transferred to A3 300gsm hot press paper. Next week we will proceed with this finished work using all the graphite techniques we explored during the first day. I will be working on a hakea laurina drawing based on a specimen supplied by the Group.
This is a fun collection of artists who are very involved with the Gardens and its' conservation. They have several workshops a year featuring different artists - Geoff Sergeant will be doing a color pencil workshop in Grevilleas there soon. If you are interested in botanical art or taking part in any of the Friends activities please click the links below for more information:
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