Botanical and Entomology Illustration Classes — Everybody Colors

Botanical and Entomology Illustration Classes

For the last two years I have been teaching botanical and entomological illustration for middle school students. I started creating mind maps to introduce them to ideas easier to illustrate than lecture about: taxonomy, anatomy, morphology, life cycles, etc. In these classes, art and science support each other in such wonderful ways. Both begin with rigorous observation. After a few weeks of drawing from life, a wall comes down and students begin to draw that daisy, or cherry blossom, or bumble bee, not the symbols that represent those species in their mind. These kids really are seeing these organisms. The longer you spend with a creature, they start becoming less of an ‘it,‘ and more of a ‘who.‘