Industrious Illustrating #60 – Botanical Gardens 3

Hello, and welcome back to another week of Industrious Illustrating! This week I’m going back to talking about my classwork for “Making Science Visible”. We recently finished our botanical illustration project where we each illustrated a plant at the Matthaei Botanical Gardens to be later compiled into a map for visitors to identify plants of interest in each biome with. Our first set of drawings are now printed out and on display at the MBG in the hallway leading up to the entrance of the indoor gardens! I personally did my painting first on paper with watercolors and inks and then digitally retouched the painting, but some of my classmates did their drawings entirely traditionally or entirely digitally. I’d definitely recommend taking a look in the near future to see how we all approached the subject matter!

My work is currently hanging in the hallway at the Matthaei Botanical Gardens alongside the work of my classmates!

Something else I did this week was stop by the UMich Natural History Museum to take reference pictures of their microscopes. Our next class project will be creating and redoing various illustrations for the Natural History Museum’s educational materials, and I volunteered to make illustrations for a revamped tutorial for using the microscope. While I was there, I also asked some of the student volunteers about the microscope’s specs and learned that the base model is a National 215 Microscope. I’m glad that I took time out of my day to gather reference materials in-person, and I’m sure that this will be a unique and challenging illustration project.

That’s all for this week! Next week I’ll be in Seattle to vend at Sakuracon, so I’ll probably be making my weekly arts ink blog post the week after. I just finished finalizing my last merch order last night for the con, so I definitely feel like taking a break from drawing for at least a couple of days (I have 2 orders of keychains and 1 order of prints on the way). To that end, I plan to spend more time with my friends and watch a movie or two this weekend. I hope every one of you guys will also have a restful weekend!