A High Note for Botanical Art

Digital artist Susan Barmon produces breathtaking botanical prints like this on a flatbed scanner – the same kind you probably have in your home office. She has painstakingly pioneered the process herself, building little scaffolds out of Tinkertoys  so she can arrange flowers in multiple layers on the scanner bed.

And it turns out, somewhat counter-intuitively, that the moving light source and optical array of her scanner can capture a sense of motion and depth of field that a camera does not. In many of Susan’s prints, petals and stems seem to curve right off the page toward you.

Each scan can take Susan hours to arrange, and she usually does 8 to 10 preview scans before she’s happy with the results. She then imports the digitized image into PhotoShop so she can even out the black background, enhance colors, adjust contrast, and get heightened visual effects.

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Susan’s prints have the glow of an illuminated manuscript, the detail of botanical illustration, and the photorealism of a 3-D movie.

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As a “gardener of convenience,” Susan grows easy annuals like zinnias and tough perennials like iris and lilies, and these sometimes make it into her works of art. She also buys simple grocery store bouquets, and snips flowers from roadsides or the gardens of friends. One winter she grew more than a dozen amaryllis bulbs in a sunny bedroom to make sure she’d have a steady supply of floral material.

Most often, I would say that the goal of floral photography is to preserve that one fleeting moment in time when a flower is perfect.  But as a gardener, Susan is fascinated with the whole life cycle of a flower. She sometimes chooses to demonstrate the ephemeral nature of plants, by picking subjects that are wilting and past their prime, if not downright exhausted. Her image of a spent peony is one of my personal favorites. It’s just so fascinatingly beautiful to me, the way the drooping petals capture a sense of motion (it reminds me of a sea anemone’s constant, gentle agitation!)

Shop for Susan’s original artwork online, where you can view a large gallery of her work in much higher resolution than the images you see here. (Hint: Bookmark her site for your holiday shopping!)

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All artwork in this post is copyrighted material and is being used with permission of the artist.

Related posts:

1. UPDATE: Susan Barmon’s Botanical Scans Now on Etsy!
2. Make Your Own Floral Accents
3. Free Photo Book Offer From Hot Prints