This is a working list, not an exhaustive one. Everything here is something we use or have used, and the notes say what it is good for. No link on this page is sponsored. Suggestions are welcome via the contact page.

Organizations and Programs

• American Society of Botanical Artists (ASBA) — the principal North American society, with exhibitions, a journal, workshops, and a directory of education programs. Membership is open to anyone.
• Society of Botanical Artists (UK) — the British equivalent, with a distance-learning diploma course that has trained many working illustrators.
• Guild of Natural Science Illustrators (GNSI) — for scientific illustration more broadly; excellent technical resources on plate conventions and reproduction.
• Botanic garden certificate programs — the Denver Botanic Gardens School of Botanical Art and Illustration; the New York Botanical Garden; the Morton Arboretum; Filoli; the Minnesota School of Botanical Art; and others. Most offer individual courses to non-certificate students. The ASBA maintains a current list.
• Colorado Native Plant Society — for Rocky Mountain readers: field trips, identification help, and the plant-conservation context for what you draw. Most states have an equivalent.

Identification and Plant Data

• iNaturalist — the observation database behind the Gesture Lab. Research-grade observations, filterable by place, date, and license. See our guide.
• Regional floras — for Colorado, Colorado Flora (Weber & Wittmann, Eastern and Western Slope volumes) and Flora of Colorado (Ackerfield). Every region has its standard flora; it is the authority for what the diagnostic characters are and what the plant's parts are called.
• Flora of North America (online) — treatments of most North American families, free, with descriptions and often line illustrations.
• SEINet and regional herbarium portals — searchable images of pressed herbarium specimens. Invaluable for leaf shape, venation, and the arrangement of parts along a stem.
• Plants of the World Online (Kew) — accepted names, synonyms, and distributions. Use it to confirm the current binomial before lettering a plate; names change.
• Biodiversity Heritage Library — scanned historical botanical works, including the great illustrated floras and Curtis's Botanical Magazine. Free, high resolution, and the best study collection of plate composition in existence.

Books

• Botanical illustration technique — The Art of Botanical Drawing (Agathe Ravet-Haevermans); Botanical Illustration Course (Rosie Martin & Meriel Thurstan); The Kew Book of Botanical Illustration (Christabel King). Any one of these covers the graphite-to-watercolor progression that programs teach.
• Botany for artists — Botany for the Artist (Sarah Simblet) is the standard; Plant Identification Terminology: An Illustrated Glossary (Harris & Harris) is the dictionary every illustrator should own — a drawing of every term.
• Scientific illustration — The Guild Handbook of Scientific Illustration (GNSI) for plate conventions, reproduction, and the professional side.
• Sketchbooks and field practice — The Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling (John Muir Laws) is broader than plants but the best book on keeping a field journal that we know of.

Materials We Use

Brands are examples, not endorsements; the categories are what matter. See the guides on graphite and choosing a medium for how each is used.

• Pencils — a range from 2H to 2B in a good wood-cased pencil (Staedtler Mars Lumograph, Faber-Castell 9000, Tombow Mono), plus a 0.3 or 0.5 mm mechanical for detail. A kneaded eraser, a vinyl eraser, and an eraser shield.
• Paper for graphite and ink — smooth Bristol (Strathmore 300/400 plate or vellum finish) or hot-press watercolor paper.
• Paper for watercolor — 100% cotton hot-press, 140 lb / 300 gsm (Arches, Fabriano Artistico, Saunders Waterford). Hot-press is the botanical standard because it takes fine detail; cold-press is for looser work.
• Watercolor — a limited professional palette. A starting set for plants: a warm and a cool yellow, a warm and a cool red, a warm and a cool blue, plus a few earths and a convenience green or two. Transparent, lightfast pigments only; check the tube.
• Brushes — small rounds (sizes 0 to 4) with a fine point, sable or good synthetic, for dry-brush botanical technique; one larger round for washes. Botanical work uses far smaller brushes than most watercolor.
• Colored pencil — a lightfast professional line (Faber-Castell Polychromos, Caran d'Ache Luminance or Pablo, Prismacolor for softer work) and a colorless blender.
• Ink — technical pens (0.1 to 0.5 mm) or a dip pen with a fine nib, and a waterproof, lightfast black ink.
• Measuring — dividers, a proportional divider if you work at magnification, a clear millimeter ruler, and a 10× hand lens. A small protractor. See measuring a specimen.
• Field kit — a pocket-sized hardbound sketchbook with paper that takes a light wash, a water brush, a small watercolor tin, and the pencils above. See the field sketchbook guide.
• Specimen care — a plant press (or heavy books and newspaper), sealable bags, a cooler for the field, and refrigerator space. See preserving specimens.

Practice Tools

• Botanical Gesture Lab — this site's timed drawing tool. Two, five, or ten minutes with a research-grade specimen from near you.
• A timer and a cheap sketchbook — the two most important practice tools, and the ones most often skipped in favor of buying better paper.
• A living plant on the windowsill — the most reliable model there is. Grow the species you want to draw, from seed if you can; you get every life stage and never have to collect.

Guides on This Site

The blog collects species spotlights — mostly Rocky Mountain natives — alongside technique and reference guides. Good starting points: graphite techniques, flower anatomy, leaf vocabulary, composing a plate, and drawing grasses and sedges. The FAQ answers the questions we get most often.