ASBA 2024 - Laura Silburn - Illustrating Ferns

Illustrating Ferns with Laura Silburn

We will look at garden and houseplant ferns to explore the botany of this fascinating and ancient group of plants and consider how you might go about recording them in graphite. As we go along, we will do some exercises to learn about ferns and break our task of recording our chosen fern down into simpler steps.

We will cover:
• The natural history and reproduction of ferns.
• Identifying parts of a fern: structure and terminology: We will look closely at the botanical features: divisions, pinnae etc. to identify and name structures, making diagrams of different types.
• Habit studies: making sketches of the habits of our ferns including height and spread.
• Drawing a frond We will look closely at a frond to note and record its features.
• Drawing a pinna: looking closely and recording the features of the pinnae of our fronds.
• Planning a composition: looking at different ways to compose pictures of ferns and sketching possible compositions for our own plant material.

Supplies:

• PL21, PL38. Your usual drawing pencils, I use a 0.3 propelling pencil for fine detail and a normal HB pencil for sketching.

• P25, P100. Cartridge paper or sketchbook

• S270. Measuring equipment: ruler/dividers

• E13. Erasers

• S781. A blender/tortillon/stump, if you have one, for quick tonal studies

Plant material - the more variety we have the more we can compare different structures. Look for ones that have the ‘sori’ on the back producing the spores too if you can. Wild ferns, garden ferns or houseplants are all good and cut fronds are useful as well as potted plants.