Technique · Fields
Botanical plate
A naturalist's page of flowers, leaves, buds and seed pods on paper, in watercolour, coloured pencil or hand-coloured engraving.
Botanical plate is a field drawn for every pixel by the graphics chip. Every piece on Synapse Drip is made from a recipe that layers techniques like this one, and you can change any of it in the Studio.
Good to know
- Before photography, botanical illustrators were how a plant's shape, colour and details were recorded for naming and teaching, which is why a plate usually shows flower, bud, leaf and seed together.
- Many flowers are built in fives (roses, hibiscus and morning glories among them); the plants that do this belong to the great group of flowering plants called the eudicots.
- A herbarium sheet mounts a pressed plant with a label saying where and when it was collected; the small handwritten labels on a plate echo that habit.
- A botanical plate shows the parts a botanist needs to name a plant, flower, bud, leaf and seed, together on one page.
- Botanical watercolourists usually work from the lightest tones to the darkest, keeping the white of the paper for the brightest highlights, because transparent paint cannot easily be lightened once it is down.
The mathematics
- Each stem is a parabola: the point a fraction t of the way along it is the base plus L (t d + k t squared n), where L is its length, d the direction it grows, n a direction at right angles to it and k its bend; the breeze changes k slowly.
- A leaf is a lens: its half-width at fraction u of its length is W sin(pi u to the power 0.8), zero at both ends and widest near the middle, and its lateral veins are drawn where the fractional part of 8u minus 1.5 |s| is one half, with s the position across the leaf from -1 to 1, so they sweep forward toward the tip.
- A morning glory repeats five times round its centre, so its outline and its white star depend on cos(2.5 a), which has period 72 degrees; a cabbage rose is six rings of scalloped petals with 5, 5, 4, 4, 3 and 3 lobes, each ring about a sixth smaller than the one outside it.
- A glaze that passes (r1, g1, b1) of the light over paper that returns (r2, g2, b2) returns (r1 r2, g1 g2, b1 b2), so overlaps deepen; here the product is not allowed to fall below half the glaze's own colour, so stacked leaves stay green instead of going black.
- The cups of a lotus pod sit on a hexagonal lattice, the arrangement that packs equal circles most tightly, and a daisy-family disc follows a similar rule with its florets placed at the golden angle of about 137.5 degrees.
In art
- Pierre-Joseph Redouté (1759 to 1840), born in what is now Belgium, painted roses and lilies for Empress Josephine's garden at Malmaison and was known as the Raphael of flowers; his book Les Roses appeared from 1817 to 1824.
- Georg Dionysius Ehret (1708 to 1770), a German-born botanical artist who worked in England, drew plants for Linnaeus, including for his Hortus Cliffortianus of 1737.
- Chromolithography, which prints each colour from its own stone, made coloured plates cheap enough for the popular garden books and magazines of the nineteenth century.
- Marianne North (1830 to 1890) painted plants in oils in their native habitats round the world and gave her pictures to Kew, where a gallery for them opened in 1882.
More ways to use it
Related techniques
Nebula and stars · Liquid · Droplets · Network · Terrain and maps · Neuron · Order to chaos · Fractal tree