Botany for the Artist, Sarah Simblet

I decided to look back through my book, 'Botany for the Artist', to gain some more ideas of where I can look in nature, without the idea of 'nature' overwhelming me and being to broad. While I used this book as a part of my inspiration last semester, I want to continue to use it as I feel it's still very relevant to what I want to do in my work. However, I intend to use it in a different way to last time, and instead of using it as the inspiration to create scientifically accurate representations of plants, I want to use it as inspiration to create well drawn, 'hybrid'plants, or 'creatures' that look alive, look as if they could start moving or growing and taking over the page, similar to a drawing I created last year, seen below.

I left this drawing incomplete, partly on purpose, to elude to the idea that it could continue to 'grow'. However I don't feel it was executed as well as it could have been, and I feel that I could have worked on the drawing for a little longer.

After creating some drawings based on one of the drawings and other ideas I've had, I realised that I'm limiting the content in them by looking at such a narrow range of images. I looked through this book and my own drawings. There were some pages within Sarah Simblet's book that stood out to me, such as a page about the anatomy of a flower, where some of the parts of the flower, such as a petal, were dismembered from the whole, separated and seen 'floating' in the page, similar to how I planned out my first drawing last semester. Looking through these pages, the drawings I'd already created and ideas generating in my own head, I came up with the idea to combine elements of different plants to create these two drawings above. Combining fungi, roots, leaves, petals, and whatever else may come to my mind, I created these drawings and will generate quite a few more until I decide I have enough to continue to develop the idea.

I feel that these have been more successful than my first attempt last semester, and communicate the idea I have better, as they look like a more 'polished', complete drawing because the idea I have is more solid now. I think with these drawings I feel a part of my confidence coming back, which is good.