Botanical Drawing Workshop: Leaves (10am 12 November 2023)

Botanical Drawing Workshop with Helen Placanica: 10am – 12 noon Sunday 12 November 2023.

Join botanical artist Helen Placanica for this 2-hour introductory workshop into botanical drawing to help you connect with and depict the natural world. This particular workshop focuses on leaves, but you can join another one of Helen's workshops if you'd like to learn how to draw nuts.

Botanical art aims to depict the form, colour and botanical details of plants accurately and with a focus on capturing the unique characteristics and inherent beauty of each plant. Botanical drawing is a foundational skill for botanical art as it is the first stage for both graphite and watercolour botanical art.

In this class, we will start by drawing the most obvious and fundamental of all plant elements: the leaves. We will have many interesting leaves on hand for you to draw, but you are also welcome to bring leaves from your favourite plants to the workshop. 

You will use graphite pencils to draw the outline of simple leaf shapes, then progress to more complex forms, including veins and stems. You will learn to carefully observe and draw what the eye sees, not what the mind thinks it should see, learning techniques to achieve accurate scale and dimension and how to use foreshortening to achieve depth and perspective. Finally, you will learn the basics of tonal shading, a technique which is used to give the flat, one-dimensional line drawing depth, form and perspective. 

Helen Placanica is a botanical artist who specialises in detailed graphite and watercolour studies to depict the bold and often bizarre but always beautiful Australian native plants. She enjoys sharing her skills in botanical art with others to help them see and appreciate the natural world in new ways.

This workshop is suitable for all skill levels: whether you think you can't draw or have a flair for various art forms, you will feel right at home. Students who are keen to develop their skills further are welcome to attend this workshop more than once to practise their drawing with guidance from Helen as they move on to more challenging plant subjects, including flowers and complete plants. Please note that we don't send workshop reminders, so please be sure to add this event to your calendar as soon as you've registered. 

Cost: $90 / $81 (Multi-pass)

Multi-pass discount: Sign up for 2 or more Plant Empire events, or register 2 or more people for the same event, to receive 10% off the ticket price (discount will appear at checkout).