Botanicals are not new. People have been painting and drawing them for thousands of years. The earliest surviving botanical work dates back to 500 AD and that was a copy of even earlier work. Botanicals are basically paintings of plants in all the parts to help identify and classify the plant. They usually contain the leaves, stems or branches, bark, blossoms or flowers, fruit or seeds, and even the roots. This makes them for scientific purposes more than art, but people have loved them as works of art for the longest time.
It isn't known when the first was taken from the pages of the herbal journal or medicinal pages and framed for the wall, but it has been popular ever since. Right now we are seeing a resurgence of popularity not just here in the US but all around the world. With that popularity have come many societies to promote and support the art form. In the US is the American Society of Botanical Artists, in the UK the Society of Botanical Artists, in Australia, the Botanical Art Society of Australia, and in South Africa, the Botanical Artists Association of South Africa, to name a few.
I've only recently joined the ranks of botanical artists when a customer requested two special ones painted for her. I immediately searched for just the right photo references and then "mashed" them together so my customer could choose which she preferred. She loved them all so much that she ordered four instead of the original two. Since then I've been having fun painting even more botanicals.
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