Whilst honing in on my qualitative research planning, I am also enhancing some drawing skills in the area of botanical illustration. Why is this? Well there’s the personal issue of how over time, like many other artists/designers, I am spending more and more time on the computer and less and less time drawing. Others (usually traditional artists and traditional lovers of art) find this distasteful. I just find it disconcerting. Disconcerting because I am not learning to transfer my skill of drawing very well to the computer. I don’t believe many others are either. With regards to my drawing, I think it’s due to the tools and computer interface I use but also my lack of experimentation and confidence. So I am concentrating on enhancing some drawing skills in the hope that I will find a way in which to develop such skills by way of experimentation with the computer. In the past I have achieved a modicum of this by using packages like streamline, freehand and illustrator, but first I used soft pencils, pastels, chalks, potatoes and scanners. However, on a more specific issue, the other reason I am looking to develop this type of drawing skill is to study how botanical illustrations that capture the form and essence of a botanical specimen could be represented online. Currently, you see such illustrations in a book or as framed pictures hung in a gallery or arboretum. I really want to discover if such illustrations, or parts of such illustrations, could be designed for online use.

All in all this work is perhaps not relevant to theirwork, but if not directly, I think indirectly. I have just spent the day with a group of ten botanical artists who were having a day of training from Pandora Sellars, one of the world’s top botanical artists. I was introduced to Pandora and explained how I wanted to develop an online drawing style or/and understand how to link to botanical artists that were interested. She liked it, and the fact that I wanted to link to sustainable issues - “and a purpose” she said “great”.

Throughout the day Pandora concentrated on composition. She did this by encouraging the class to bring different drawn elements into one image, and by focussing on detail and line. At the end of the day she reinforced what I had been reading about, how the practice of botanical illustration is one of slow drawing. You take your time. You plan. You re-organise. You observe continually. You often have to indulge in several different specimens, you might have to adapt your drawing. But first, you have to really think: What’s this drawing for?

This was so exciting to hear as I realised how much it related to the development of slow software. How you take your time when developing something, you work on it over time, you respond to what’s happening, to the people that are using the software, to the changes. And you must decide: What is this piece of work for, what will it effect?

During the training with Pandora I took my time drawing. I spent hours drawing one object. I kept thinking, “I am indulging too much”. But when I got home I understood that this was an important day for my work, as not only did I find time to observe a species all day long, I was asked to make a slow drawing. I realised that I had only been carrying out quick drawings for a number of years.

Pandora Sellars finished off the day by saying how great botanical illustration was because it was so portable. “All you need is a pencil, a box of paints and a piece of paper, and you can go anywhere in the world and make an object like this.” She showed us her current work. I can’t describe the detail. It was immense. It looked totally accurate, every hair on the stem had been highlighted, but it was still so alive and the lines were so energetic.

Since that day I have spent some time researching into contemporary botanical artists. It is interesting to see why some of them are employed, and to compare this to in the Victorian era. I might do a literature review on my findings, but first of all I have to type up my qualitative research literature review. It takes precedence.

Thinking about these two areas of work and the term slowness, I am interested, if in the future, botanical artists would want to add their work to maps of an environment, creating visual habitat data, or even the habitat layer of the map. Or maybe, thinking broader in terms of drawings and users, a community group, such as a school or an adult evening class, would like to add their own drawings to online maps.

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