Just Draw Botanicals: Beautiful Botanical Art, Contemporary Artists, Modern Materials

Just Draw Botanicals is a beautifully curated artwork collection and gallery book by Helen Birch. Due out 3rd March 2020 from Quarto on their White Lion imprint, it's 208 pages and will be available in flexibound format.

This is both an inspiration book and (much less so) tutorial or instruction book. It covers a very wide range of artistic styles and subjects. The only common theme is the botanical subject. It includes a helpful picture gallery table of contents as well as an artist index, so readers can concentrate on one artist at a time or the entire smorgasbord of variety which is included.

A short introduction is followed by the gallery of works. Each of the studies has the work on a full page with a *short* info and tips section on the facing page. These explanations include techniques such as medium used and other contrast and style info.

The gallery is followed by a short fundamental tutorial for drawing botanicals: choosing tools and materials, getting started, painting, sketching, and working digitally. The tutorial chapter segues into a short (but fairly useful) bibliography and links for further reading.

This is a well done book showing a very wide variety of rendering techniques. This would be a valuable resource for a student up to professional artist, or as a beautiful art book in its own right. I'm emphatically not a gifted artist, but I found a number of good tips in this compilation.

Five stars

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.