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| Botanical paintings helps to recognize species of plant. Photo by: Işık Güner |
Perhaps one of the most popular form of arts. Not as popular as portrait paintings, but plays important roles in human advancement in scientific studies and medicine. Same at any other form of arts, botanical paintings evolved from thousand years ago. Anyway, they play different roles with the advancement of technologies. Today, we have better ways to record botanical specimen, and at the same time the botanical arts helps to deliver what the modern technology cannot do.
Botanical arts or paintings were used in order
to recognize types of plants that can be used for medical purposes, or plants
with commercial values such as herbs and spices. When the botanical knowledge
getting larger, the botanical paintings/illustration helps to segregate plants
into their family and species that also helped human to develop new crops that
produce more yields or immune to some diseases.
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| Botanical paintings make plants, recording into work of arts. Photo by: Julia Trickey |
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| Anna Mason one of the best botanical painters. Photo by: Anna Mason |
Today, botanical artist can choose to fulfil
all of these purposes. They have a broad range of purposes in delivering their
arts. They can do botanical illustrator with high accuracy details, in order to
help botanist to recognize plant species for recording purposes. They also can
do botanical
art to show their subject’s aesthetic value. This type of art is the
best to medium as an introduction to those who never get exposed to botanical
illustration or botanical art before. The last approach that artist can do is
through flower painting, without accuracy. This creative approach just
as any other painting by representing plants just by artist creativity and
imagination.
No matter which types of approaches that you
are working on, botanical art is one of the best ways to preserve the plant
specimen. Today, botanical artists can produce higher accuracy illustration and
arts with the use of higher quality materials. The artist’s hard work, then
share for many other viewers, through publication and exhibition. This
beautiful result not only works educational medium, but also as piece of art at
the same time.
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| Botanical paintings sometimes included insects and other animals. Photo by: Angela Leck |
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| Another wonderful botanical painter, Heidi Willis. Photo by: Heidi Willis |
There are many botanical artists out there that
sharing their knowledge through free and paid courses. You don’t have to be as
good as the professional botanical artist to help recording the backyard’s
specimens - just follow few important keys to make sure you are doing it right.
We will see some of the botanical artists that
we can learn from their YouTube channel. Other than that, we also can learn
from books or DVD’s we can buy through online. Visit the exhibition is another
good practice to learn from other artist works. We will improve faster when
learning from those who already mastered the fields.
Hopefully botanical arts will grows among all
of us in order to collect botanical data from all over the world. Because
plants change so fast (produce new species), without proper record, we might
lose many important plants that important to our survival. Enjoy the nature,
embrace their beauty.
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