Josh Overington

Pen & Ink, Photoshop This piece is a culmination of botanical illustration skills I have developed further this term. I chose to lean into my pen and ink renderings for my botanical assignments and use the constrained techniques of hatching and stipple to capture as much detail as possible. I did three of these illustrations, each of which is a different crucial plant to the Humboldt redwood forest where I live. The first was the Five-Finger Maidenhair Fern, the second was the Pacific Trillium and the final was the Western Skunk Cabbage. Of the three pieces this was by far the most successful because I rendered each of the elements separately and on a much larger scale and then did all of my layout work in photoshop. This plant is interesting to me because of its gigantic size and abrasive odor. Skunk cabbage leaves can grow up to 50 inches long and 30 inches wide! Far larger than any other local native plant and they use a pungent smell (hence the name skunk) to attract pollinators to their beautiful yellow flowers.