Botanical Drawing in Color: A Basic Guide to Mastering Realistic Form and Naturalistic Color Paperback – Illustrated, July 20, 2010

As an artist, I always encourage my students to look at the real object, if possible-- be it a flower, leaf, plant, bird, or animal. I do want them to use their "artistic eye" and really study what they are seeing. This gives them a scientifically accurate frame of reference on which to base their drawings. Author, illustrator Wendy Hollender does the same thing in her book, Botanical Drawing in Color: A Basic Guide to Mastering Realistic Form and Naturalistic Color. She is the coordinator of botanical art and illustration at the New York Botanical Garden, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and the National Tropical Botanical Garden. In her book, she gives readers step-by-step instructions. Each lesson increases in complexity to build your skills. She describes form first, color second. She wants the reader to feel comfortable with the use of color before she introduces color theory. She wants the reader to feel comfortable with the process of drawing before she introduces perspective. She has many lessons marked with a green art nouveau style leaf. The lesson will require you to do something other than just reading the text. Each lesson is like an exercise to warm the reader/artist up. She starts out with the very basic--how to sharpen your pencil! She shows examples of historic botanical prints as well as the modern Vera textile designs. She suggests, "Do not strive to copy my illustrations, but rather learn my techniques and use them to create a realistic version of the plant...in your own style."She encourages her students to slow down, observe closely, learn step-by-step. A very well-written and beautifully illustrated book. A must for every artist.

A good how to text, illustrative and descriptive.

I purchased two books on Botanical art (the other was Ann Swan's Botanical Portraits with Colored Pencils) and I must say that, while both books are excellent, Wendy Hollender's book really hit the mark for me. I especially like that Botanical Drawing in Color is just what it says it is - only more! If you are interested in developing your skills in this medium, you need look no further. Wendy gives you clues and secrets she has obviously learned over her lifetime...she is a valuable resource. This book is a full course that will develop your talent and deepen your interest in this beautiful and creative work. I am working (slowly, as Wendy says) and not skipping anything! The financial investment is minimal; some colored pencils some watercolor paper (the best 100% cotton, of course) and a place to work and you're good to go! Well, it's a little more than that, but you couldn't have a better workbook than Wendy Hollender's book. If you want to learn this art, buy this book. Look her up at her website, [...],where she also sells some of the tools of the trade.

Wendy Hollender has a unique and somewhat old-fashioned approach to colored pencil. Unlike most authors, she does not favor using a zillion colors or equally many layers. This is a good thing. The emphasis on so many layers/colors is both off-putting and not terribly helpful. Most readers of colored pencil books do not have the weeks or months of time that some artists take to complete a piece. There are other books that stress that 95% of all effects can be achieved in 3 layers or fewer, and I believe it. Perhaps the best advice on the books is her 20 pencil palette. All of the images in the book can be produced with only 20 polychromos pencils. I believe this is the only colored pencil book on the market that makes use of only 20 pencils. For a semi-beginner like myself, restricting attention to 20 pencils is the best advice I got. Instead of pursuing just the right color, I learned how to blend and layer my limited palette in myriad creative ways. Moreover, as a commenter notes below, her advice is a bit ahead of the game. While Prismacolor pencils have long dominated the market, offering rich, creamy feel at lower price, their decision to outsource production to Mexico has resulted in significant degradation of quality. Prismas break easily, are hard to sharpen, and lack consistency in the quality if their color, feel, and production.This is all good for Polychromos lovers, but there are key limitations to the book. Being oil based, Polychromos pencils lay down differently from most other pencils, which are waxed based. This limits some of the advice given in the book. (For the record, I abandoned Polychromos owing to expense, switching to Derwent stuff, which is high quality, waxed based like Prisma, but much more reasonably priced than Polychromos.)A more important limitation concerns the content of the book. About 75% of the book contains lead-in, toning, perspective, composition, etc. While this is all important, it can be found elsewhere and little of it had to do specially with colored pencil technique, the main reason for buying the book. Indeed, the bulk of the exercises are to be executed in graphite rather than colored pencil. A long section is devoted to developing a botanical notebook concerning the reproduction and other phases of the plant. This is nice, but quite useless if you cannot render the plant semi-accurately owing to lack of instruction and practice.It's a mice enough book, but far from perfect owing to both the quirks of the author , which are readily forgiven, and the choice of material, which is more problematic. If she revises the book, I hope she gives more time to the process of drawing using her "big 20" collection of pencils, and less time to the philosophy of keeping plant journals and the like. The readers of the book want to learn how to paint with colored pencils effectively--especially using her techniques.

I learned so much, not only about botanicals, but also about using colored pencils. Well written and a wealth of information.