Intro to Botanical Painting, Vegetables - Kew Online Course

Welcome to this online course from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, brought to you in partnership with David and Charles. You are about to embark on a journey into realistic botanical painting. You will combine a variety of brushwork techniques and colour mixes to create a beautiful, natural-history style artwork of a capsicum (sweet red pepper).

Although she always knew she’d follow an artistic route, Rachel first discovered watercolour when studying for her Bachelor of Arts degree in Illustration. Her tutor recommended watercolour as the medium best suited to her realistic, natural history style of work. Although her original fascination was with insects, she found the lack of diversity of large specimens in the UK restrictive, and swapped to plants due to the sheer number of varieties available. At her degree show, someone suggested that Rachel took her series of spring flowers to the RHS show, and it was here that she made her first contact with the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew and considered becoming a botanical artist.

On visiting Kew, Rachel found she was most interested in their pressed specimens, and was fascinated by their immediate link with history: one person intentionally collected these plants for a specific reason on a particular day. While studying for an MA at the Royal School of Art, Rachel arranged another visit to Kew to see the dried specimens in the Herbarium – here she was introduced to two of Kew’s amazing botanists in the legumes section, who had laid out a whole array of huge bean pods and fantastic peas for her to view. Rachel was granted a research pass to paint the collection and visited the Herbarium daily for a number of years.

Rachel continues to work closely with Kew, with career highlights so far including creating the ground breaking 5.5m-long Herbarium Specimen Painting, worked in sections that slot together when it is on display in a special cabinet in the Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art at Kew. Her illustrations of the pea and bean seed collection represented contemporary botanical art at the Tate’s watercolour exhibition in 2011. Rachel has created two botanical painting books: Flowers: The Watercolor Art Pad and RHS Botanical Art the Watercolour Art Pad, due to be published Christmas 2021. She also illustrated Forage: Wild Plants to Gather and Eat by Liz Knight, and has designed the packaging for a Korean cosmetics company. Her work has been adapted by Liberty for one of their floral fabrics, famously used for a Vivian Westwood dress and by many other designers.

Please note that the materials required are no longer available to purchase as a kit, so you will need to source the following items before you begin:

2 x sheets 300gsm hot pressed paper

2B pencil

Mechanical eraser

Paintbrushes: sizes 000 and 6

Watercolour paints in seven colours:

• Cadmium Red

• Permanent Alizarin Crimson

• Dioxazine Violet

• Cadmium Yellow

• Sap Green

• Hooker's Dark Green

• Payne's Grey

You will also need:

• Red pepper

• Palette

• Jar of water

• Pencil sharpener

• Ruler

• Board

• Kitchen knife and chopping board to prepare the pepper

• A4 scrap paper to lay out composition

• Camera/phone

• Tissue paper

For this practice exercise, we’re going to create a simple 3-D shape using the techniques and paints that we’ll be used for the final pepper painting. The pepper requires quite strong colours, so Rachel has designed this tutorial to increase your confidence when mixing the paints, applying them to the page and building up the colour in layers.