Career Post (#2)

The career that I chose to focus on this quarter was a botanical artist, also called a botanical illustrator. Botanical artists reference plants and flowers. They then draw or paint them in a scientifically accurate manner. This job's a little hard to pin down with respect to actual concrete opportunities and job descriptions. From what I can tell, though, botanical artists mainly publish their work in scientific books/journals, occasionally exhibit it, and sometimes work for archives or teach classes on botanical art.

Because I picked a much broader and less specific category of career this time, I couldn't find particularly specific job qualifications or requirements. The ones that I did find were at least a bachelor's degree in some kind of art and design, maybe a minor in natural sciences, and potentially going to one of the few places with specialty programs to get a certificate in scientific illustration. Something that's interesting about this career is that a lot of sources said that you could be self-taught. I couldn't really find a conclusive answer for what the best program of this type is in the USA, but I did find out that the Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden here in Richmond actually offers a certificate program!

This is a photo of a botanical piece that I did when I took a class on botanicals this past summer! It's in watercolor and it's of a purple coneflower. Sorry the photo's kind of bad quality, I didn't have any other pictures of the piece so this is the best I could do.