This charmingly illustrated book is an ideal guide to the art of botanical drawing and painting. You should never hesitate to pull a flower apart to understand how it fits together, to turn the subject round until you are satisfied with its position, or to do pencil sketches of it in various positions. From sketching basic shapes and making volumes to creating textures and visualising the colour spectrum, this book is here to teach you how to look and observe, since you can only properly transcribe what you understand. Through step-by-step demonstrations and with colourful illustrations, Agathe Ravet-Haevermans teaches you how to recognise and draw a wide variety of flowers and leaves, and covers the textures and structural elements of a range of different plants including succulents, vegetables, trees and grasses. Practical as well as beautiful, The Art of Botanical Drawing is a necessary addition to the bookshelves of anyone interested in botanical art.

This book is ambitiously inter-disciplinary. Its eleven works, in full colour, form a striking contribution to the commonwealth of colour studies and to a possible unification of C. P. Snow's Two Cultures. Colour and inter-disciplinarity go hand in hand. This so often involves the authors leaving the comfort zone of their original specialty and striving for excellence in another. The personal story of Franziska Schenk is but one good example. Colour in Art, Design and Nature may be divided into four main sections, defined in terms of the authors themselves. First, there are two contributions by biologists. Second, the largest section is by practicing artists. Third, there are two engineering-based contributions. Finally, two contributions address some of the historical proponents of colour theory and art. It seems that our perceptions of aesthetics and beauty must be very flexible indeed so as to find absolute opposites equally fascinating. If so, it goes to show how wonderful are the construction and operation of the human brain. Does psychology win in the end? Does colour lead to a single culture?"