Sketching plant portraits

Take your time to observe and get to know a single plant with your sketchbook. Recently I’ve been drawing the plants and trees around me, and it’s fascinating how much you can get from even the tiniest or unremarkable weed. I reserve one page for each plant, and try to find out as much as I can about it by drawing it first. Sometimes I will research more about the plant later and add information.

Sketching nature like this is fun, because it allows you to focus on a single organism, and go really deep with your investigation. I’ve learnt interesting things about plants and trees I see every day and take for granted, and this practice forces me to look more closely. Through these sketched portraits and through gardening I’m slowly learning more about botany and get more knowledge about the different plant families and species.

Plants are an easy target for beginners because they don’t move, although they can be hard to draw when they have a lot of tiny delicate parts. I often tend to lose my patience with drawing them, but I figure it’s a good practice for building drawing skills, and letting myself be pulled into a concentrated activity. More often than not, it works. And when it doesn’t, I try to give the sketch a deliberate loose quality.

I like to make a pencil or pen drawing first, and then add a bit of watercolor on top. I usually go with the flow and don’t have a special layout I follow, although I often have the classic botanical paintings in mind when I arrange my page.

You can of course also sketch trees, parts of trees (like my linden tree), or any fungi you might find outside. Any animal that you can watch over a bit of time is a nice subject, too – you can include different poses and behaviors. These one-page portraits are a great method to deepen your knowledge about any object in nature.