Getting the right look

I recently posted about an artwork of mine called Botanical Books, a little installation of fifteen books whose structure and binding related to the appearance of the various plants.
This post is about how I achieved the look of the illustrations.  The fifteen books were intended to look like specimens in a museum display case, and I wanted the illustrations to look like very old simple line botanical illustrations that would be in keeping with the medieval material I was using, calfskin vellum.

I kept thinking of some beautiful old illustrations in red chalk that I'd seen by Leonardo da Vinci in an exhibition at the QAG back in 1984, (Leonardo da Vinci Nature Studies from the Royal Library at Windsor Castle) and I can only tell you that because the catalogue lives in my bookcase. This illustration of Dyer's Greenweed by Leonardo was just the look I was after, and I experimented with lots of things before I came up with a solution.

Leonardo da Vinci


I ended up making drypoint plates and engraving the drawings onto scraps of perspex and polycarbonate and this had a lovely raised burr.

Unfortunately for me, I don't have a press at home, so I was forced to be more creative.  I also wanted a very soft look that I could control.  I made rubbings of the plates with a soft brown Conte pencil onto tracing paper.  This was then glued to pieces of vellum and the images were cut out and sewn to the little books in different ways.  The tracing paper disappeared and became invisible, leaving the images looking as though they had been made directly onto the vellum.

In the end, I was pleased with the result as it approximated what I had intended.