Botanical Art

 
 
 
Ink Illustration : Cerbera manghas: Continuing my effort of sharing my botanical illustrations, would

like to share ink illustration for Cerbera manghas.

Great art, fantastic effort and skill,

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To answer your other question about the illustration, I have been illustrating for quite some time as a passion (no way linked to my qualification and profession).
And what fascinates me for illustration? the answer is botanical forms!
There have been little or virtually no discussion on our forum regarding Botanical Illustration per se. Botanical Illustrations form an integral part of our floras. Hence thought of triggering the subject by taking this initiative of sharing my own illustrations.
Would also like to thank all for the good words.

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ABOUT BETTER THINGS

I love and collect BOTANICAL art. and botanical art related books.. inherited love of botanical art from my parents, mom in particular… just got DAPURI DRAWINGS book of old indian botanical art now residing in Edinburgh museum repository, originally the art work was commissioned buy Alexander Gibson , a doctor who also founded the first(may be???) botanical garden in India in DAPURI Maharashtra …

MoBot …missouri botanical garden website has hundreds of scanned images of wonderful botanical drawings.. of superb quality, being done by many trained landscape painters, they have great european precision…

we can certainly have discussion on botanical art, I am sure we have many members who remain silent because they are into art/ drawings and not photography…. like … symbiosis series why dont you start a series called botanical art and submit whever the mood strikes and make the subject line as … botanical art 1, 2, 3 etc etc… that way those of us who want to look at your art will know where to go and we will have a nice archive starting with yours…
You have submitted a few so far, may be you can gather them up and start a new thread and submit all of them in one email… let that be your first of the series… your series will bring out art lovers among us…

looking forward to it…

Based on your suggestion I will try and figure out something.
You mentioned about Dapuri drawings. The place Dapuri (Now Dapodi) is a small suburb close to Pune. As far as I know the botanical garden ceased to exist long ago. But the drawings have travelled through time in some secret vault.
Am yet to buy the book but am sure it is going to be worth buying one.

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I dont know if you are aware of GABA, Guild of Asian Botanical Artists. I will suggest you to become a member of that. It may be useful for you to spread your skills and explore others too.
By the way, the sketch was very nice and you have very keen eyes.

… is a self trained botanical artist and is aspiring to undertake a course in UK as and when opportunity comes on. He is also an engineer and an amateur plant lover like me. We are contemplating to produce a field guide on ‘Coastal Plants of Western India’ and have been exploring the western coast together. … contribution will be his excellent illustrations. Some taxonomist proudly derogate field guides as just ‘photographic books’ hence instead of including scanned images of dead specimen we will be illustrating live plants with drawings besides the photographs. Undoubtedly drawing is the best way to illustrate a plant but this may be feasible here because the number of species in the proposed book are few. Can not imagine a series of field guides covering 2000 species with drawings.

I always have immense respect for botanical artists. Now a days we get many botanists who cant draw, cant take picture but are good at taxonomy. I dont want to disrespect anyone here but for me a good taxonomist is the one who is also a good illustrator+good photographer +good computer skills. A good illustrator can see things in better details than a usual person.
This is my personal belief 🙂
…, if you can paint too then I have a scientific offer for you for a publication in co-authorship.

Honoured ! to do something you mentioned. Would be more than willing to take up an assignment!

Dapodi and Dapuri are TWO distinctly different places, one is way inlands, another nearer to the coast, … google earth shows them well…

There could be two distinct places currenly with names Dapodi and Dapuri as you have mentioned. But there is little doubt that the Dapuri drawings belong to current day Dapodi near Pune (Poona). Following link of RBGE may clear the mist.
The name Dapuri should be either attributed to have been wrongly pronounced by British or the current name Dapodi is a distorted version of yesteryear Dapuri.
Alexander Gibson was posted in Pune. Dalzell was an assistant to him (who authored Flora of Bombay).

Thanks … the author of the book is a friend… I have known of these pictures for a while now, at least a decade… am just not familiar with geography of the western india…

Oh wow, while I was exchanging emails with … all this activity was going on in eflora…
great..I have seen some published line drawings of orchids by … they are good.. and precise…
and now … so I know two pen and ink drawers in eflora…
At presidency college in Botany honors we had to take a class a week in pencil drawing of the botanical specimen… did you have to do that? …???
That training of a few months came in very handy in Anatomy and physiology classes in med school!!! ha ha… and seriously though.. to this day I can explain intricate steps of surgery or some tumor in line drawings better than most doctors… and to my tailors, I can draw dresses etc in details so that they/he /she can sew the garments perfectly… at least thats what they tell me…
SO talent in one part of life translates to another and helps life go smoothly…

I just thought of this, … if you go get the training and develop a new side business… it would be a perfect example of following your bliss that we recely discussed in another thread here in last few days…

I had written a mail to … at TBGRI with cc to … and got a positive response from him. Have forwarded the reply to him. Hope it could be of some help.
As per my understanding … is doing it as a part of hobby and not for business but whatever he may, all art is his and he can use it the way he wants. My main purpose of asking him to become a part of
GABA was to expose him to the international standards of Botanical Illustrations. This was as a part of my respect for a capable illustrator like himself.

Superb illustration again ….

 
 
 
 

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