Featured Artist in 'Talking Point' Dec. 2001, the UK Coloured Pencil Society newsletter.

I came to both botanical art and colour pencil by accident. I studied briefly at Manchester College of Art & Design in the 60’s and although an oil painter by inclination I studied textile design. I learnt quite a lot but enjoyed the freedom and parties even more (it was the 60’s), so was unable to continue my studies. After leaving I eventually married and went to live in Uganda. Here I continued to paint large abstracts in oils and on the breakdown of both my marriage and the country (Idi Amin era!) I returned to England and went into office work. I worked my way up and used my drawing ability to work variously on traffic system and product design drawings.

Then in the late 70’s I made a major career change motivated by my inability to have children and went to work in a children’s home. This eventually led to my retraining as a social worker and any form of painting was sidelined to mediocre watercolours painted on vacations. In 1988 however, I became seriously ill with M.E. and was forced to give up work and during my long recovery I started pencil drawing. Inspired by a painting of a cabbage in a magazine I drew my first pencil cabbage, and on the strength of that I applied for an Enterprise Grant. This enabled me to get my first 2 limited edition prints (of cabbages) done and to concentrate on building a career around botanical art.

In those first few years I was buffered by the security of my husbands income but I did make some money and managed to improve my pencil technique enough to gain first a Silver-Gilt medal for drawings of carnivorous plants and rhododendrons, and then 2 Gold Medals from the Royal Horticultural Society for a series of drawings of Lycaste orchids. This latter commission was to help enormously in establishing my career. The drawings were commissioned by Dr Henry Oakeley owner of the National Collection of Lycastes and his collection of my drawings now numbers 54 in total and have subsequently gained me a further 2 Gold Medals from the RHS.

The majority of this early work was in pencil but I felt pressure to move into colour as it is obviously more popular. I tried watercolour but every time gave up in despair. Then I remembered a technique I had used at college to translate paintings into textile designs. I used oil pastels, blended them in with turpentine and then designed over the top on pencil. This worked well for abstracts and still life but was too inaccurate and messy for botanical work. So I then turned to colour pencils and the rest, as they say, is history.

Initially I only used colour in part of the picture, maybe doing the foreground flower stems in colour with the background still in pencil, with which I was far more confident. Then in 1994 Kew Gardens contacted me with a view to exhibiting my work there along with Coral Guest and Christine Hart-Davies. Kew liked the part colour pictures as they felt they reflected how the early plant hunters in the field worked, just recording one flower in detailed colour and the rest in pencil or ink.

The exhibition was a success and introduced my work to so many people around the world and opened all sorts of doors. One of these was to have a work exhibited at the Hunt Institute of Botanical Illustration in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the largest collection of botanical work in the world. Another was to have work included the collection of Dr Shirley Sherwood, the largest privately owned collection of botanical art in the world. So this way of working became my signature for a while. My work evolves very slowly but over the intervening years since Kew I have grown to really love the colour work as much as the pencil, and my colour has become more and more intense. Also I have worked hard at creating innovative and interesting compositions rather than just plonking the specimen in the middle of a sea of white paper. I have also focused on the more humble of our vegetables such as Brussels Sprouts, beans and onions because we take them so much for granted and never really look at them or glorify them as we do the more glamorous flowers.

By it’s nature this way of working is very slow and painstaking. My output per year is not enough to keep the wolf from the door so I have published a series of Limited Edition Prints and greetings cards which I try to sell at shows like Chelsea and Hampton Court Flower Show, and by mail order. Also recently I have branched out into drypoint engraving which seems to fit in with my love of detail and feel for design. Its like playing mud pies after doing brain surgery, a great release and great fun!

In my spare time I teach at various venues around the country including RHS Gardens at Wisley, Cambridge Botanic Gardens and Dedham Hall and I do an annual stint as artist in residence at Nature in Art, Wallsworth Hall, near Gloucester. A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to move into a beautiful old wreck of a coach house with an enormous, purpose built studio so now I can really indulge myself, teach from home and who knows what effect it may have on my work. Maybe I shall take a break from detail and return to large, colourful abstracts!

Bunch of Garlic

Nectarine

Purple Irises

Scarlet Runner Bean

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My first love still remains detailed pencil drawing. Someone once said that I must have endless patience at which my partner David fell off his perch laughing. I don't, I just love the challenge and I get a real kick out of seeing the subject take on a three-dimensional quality, like sculpting in graphite. My favoured paper is Fabriano 5 hot pressed 350gms for both pencil and coloured pencil. To achieve the continuous tone effect I use little ellipses and I use a magnifying glass to keep the transition from dark to light as seamless as possible.

The Bunch of Garlic (left, 47x45cm mounted) illustrates the technique I have evolved of creating a coloured background with a detailed pencil drawing on top. First I work out the composition and draw the outline. Then I use Conte pastels and pastel pencils to roughly place on the colour, masking out any areas I wish to remain white with masking fluid. This technique works with any form of dry media from wax crayons and oil pastels through to coloured pencils and watercolour pencils, they all blend with a solvent. I prefer Conte pastel as I can blend the colours with my fingers before I use the solvent. The one I now prefer is called "Zest-it", a low toxicity lemon based solvent. I have used white spirit and Schwan Stabilo solvents in the past, but they are all unpleasant and should be used with care in a well ventilated room. The solvent dissolves the wax binding the pigment and takes the colour straight into the paper thus staining the paper. I use cotton wool buds or pads to blend in the solvent and I keep wiping the paper with clean pads until all the surplus colour is removed. Then I do the detailed pencil drawing over the colour. This is also a good technique for getting rid of the white of the paper quickly and covering large areas in colour without your arm dropping off.

I also use the above technique as a base for a lot of my colour work, but instead of working over in pencil I continue the detailed work using coloured pencils. When I am working just in colour I tend to put my shading in first using a range of greys from dark to light and warm to cold. Then I may use some complementary colours to give added depth, and then build up the colours in layers from dark to light. If I haven't got the intensity I'm seeking I repeat the process until all the paper is covered and the colour is really dense then finally I burnish either with the lightest colour, white or a blender pencil. With the Irises (left, 53x59cm) I burnished with the very soft Karisma white to give the velvet texture on the deep purple petals, and with ivory on the green leaves and stems to give the bloom effect typical of iris leaves.

This Nectarine (left, 42x35cm)shows how I build up layers and layers, maybe up to 10 layers of dry coloured pencil to get the very vibrant colours. I have used the white of the paper as the main highlight but achieved the other more muted highlights by again burnishing over the layers with a soft white. With a fruit like this which has a natural sheen I actually polish the surface of the drawing with some cotton wool to remove any pencil texture marks and give the surface of the drawing a sheen.

The drawing of a Scarlet Runner Bean (left, 64x48cm) combines all the techniques in one picture. The long, green beans are done with the technique of pencil detail over a colour base. The leaves are worked in coloured detail over a coloured base and the flowers in layered dry colour. The small bean is also layered dry colour and then polished and finally I can enjoy completing the young shoot just in pencil.