Botany and Data Collection

After my first tutorial on Tuesday with Alex, I have spent the last week looking into Botany as a way of representing nature scientifically.

Botanical Drawing of Oak branch - www.lizzieharper.co.uk

I looked at botany books from the library to study how botanists drew, including their use of composition, media, language and subject matter. I produced a few drawings in response, looking at plants that were beneficial to humans, such as he crocus which is thought to contain a cancer cure. I realised that most botanists drew tonal drawings in pencil and then painted over their drawing, and left some areas in black and white to emphasise the area in colour which I felt worked well. I felt that the Cone flower drawing below was the most successful, as loved experimenting with watercolour on top of pencil, and I also thought that leaving some areas without paint worked well. I used the paint to emphasise the bits of the flower that I thought were most important

Cone Flower drawing inspired by Botany illustrations

This drawing also lead me to think about the anatomy of flowers, due to the cross section at the bottom right. I have found an amazing book in the library called The anatomy of Flowers which has massively inspired me. I am looking forward to getting the chance to explore this next week.

Anna Gillespie Sculpture made of Acorns

This week I was also inspired by Anna Gilespie after seeing one of her sculptures at Artzu. She uses materials that nature discards which seem meaningless. I decided to draw some of her subject matter, as well as taking this as an opportunity to collect my own ' scientific data' on my walk into University. I passed 3 beech trees and collected seeds from each, drawing their different colours and mapping them as I went. Although this seemed like a small task at the time I think the idea of representing data naturally has a lot of potential and I intend to develop this further as a result.

Sketchbook page about collecting Beech Seeds.

As well as drawing beech seeds, I decided to collect other materials discarded by nature and draw them in a botanical way, linking both elements to my work this week. I used different media and paper to experiment, and I thought that the different sycamore seeds on the black (below) worked particularly well, as it's striking and the colours stand out. The drawings below also represent how nature changes over time, as the Hosta leaf has started to decompose and the top sycamore was dried out, linking to the idea of representing data mentioned in my learning agreement.

Sketchbook page: Decomposing Hosta leaf (left) and Sycamore seed collection drawing

This idea of using time as a way of collecting data could be developed next week, along with looking further into the anatomy of flowers.