The Botanical Artist

A beautiful notebook especially designed with the botanical artist in mind to write specific notes about the specimens being studied and sketch at the same time.

Over 720,000 Royal Botanic Kew titles sold!

Kew Gardens receives more than 1.8 million visitors a year, making it one of the top 15 most visited attractions in the UK.

The archive of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew is one of the most valuable botanical archives in the world.

The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew houses the largest and most diverse botanical collections in the world. The illustration archives contain more than 170,000 prints and drawings of plants. It is one of London's top tourist attractions and is a World Heritage Site.

Françoise Balsan graduated with a degree in Art History from the École du Louvre and the Sorbonne (Paris IV), and specialized in botanical watercolor. After first copying oil paintings, she switched to watercolor. Balsan considers Nicolas Robert, Claude Aubriet, Maria Sibylla Merian and Pierre-Joseph Redouté to be masters of the genre. With her academic background, Balsan researched the writings of Redouté's students while studying his techniques. Thanks to her teaching experience, the techniques of early 19th-century watercolor painting have become accessible in this book. Balsan teaches in Paris and Saint Germain-en-Laye, and holds seminars in botanical watercolor painting in the Perche region of France.