Rita Parkinson The Botanical Art Files Composition: The Design Guide for Botanical Artists

I love this book! It gives concise details and examples to help you improve your composition and develop your artistic style. It has a simple layout which also appealing. A must have on your library shelf!

I purchased this book before Christmas. As someone who is relatively new to botanical painting in watercolour, and not someone with a "natural" ability to rearrange a live specimen to create a more appealing composition, I have found this book very informative and helpful. The illustrations are well-chosen to illustrate the concepts, and close observation of the final paintings has allowed me to solve some problems that I have encountered as I continue learn this beautiful art. It meets my specific "problems with composition" needs, and I have found myself re-reading sections as I work within classes and on my own.

As a student of botanical art and illustration, I was very excited to see a book published that deals solely with composition for this specialty. The authors are Australian botanical artists and educators who have written a book on what they term "the ten essential principles of visual design for botanical artists." Most botanical art books spend minimal time on this topic, addressing primarily the technical details of drawing in graphite, colored pencil or watercolor. In many ways this book has filled that gap. The book is well-organized and covers a wide-range of important topics. Unfortunately, there are some problems, and they are not insignificant. While the artwork is beautiful on the whole, some of it is so poorly printed that the details appear smudged or unclear, and some of the print legends are very small. Most of the problems with clarity and detail are in the representations of work in graphite (a specific example of poor legibility is the section called Working Drawings, pp18-19). Other artwork contains so little detail that by contrast it seems almost cartoonish. In some cases the artwork does not clearly demonstrate the concept under discussion or the topic is not explained clearly enough. An example is the section on the Rule of Thirds, Golden Section and Fibonacci sequence. Other sections contain confusing or contradictory material, such as the troubleshooting chart where a depiction of three pears is labeled a problem because "an even number of elements is often preferable as it can avoid an uncomfortable split." In the next row of the same chart the reader is urged to avoid an even number of elements for the same reason! There are also very significant grammatical errors throughout the book, including numerous words spelled incorrectly and many incomplete sentences. This lack of proper editing is irritating in what is obviously intended as a professional publication. In summary, while this book fills a welcome need in the botanical art community and presents a well-organized broad overview of concepts related to visual design applied to botanical art, the very poor editing and presentation of some of the artwork are very disappointing.

Excellent book on botanical composition. I would have given it five stars but the table of contents on the first page was printed upside down :)

For content this book rates 5 stars. It is a creative, insightful, and thought-provoking read for the botanical artist and illustrator in particular but also for graphic artists of whatever subject matter. You will learn a lot from this book. For design of the book pages it comes close to a perfect 5, as well. The creative use of different positive-negative backgrounds for the text pages is generally successful, although not so the lightest gray background with white lettering which is hard to read. However, the book rates only a 2 at best for proof reading of the text, which is littered with an embarrassing quantity of misspellings, grammatical goofs and other typos of every sort.. Yet even though you may wince at every new glitch, you should persevere and read this book for its great content.