Last weekend we celebrated my sister’s birthday. Rather than heading out for a night on the town, we headed for the hills instead. How times have changed!
Saturday morning found us on Bennachie, where I took the opportunity to gather reference material and take a closer look at cowberry (Vaccinium vitis-idaea), a plant I was studying for a botanical painting.
Also known as lingonberry, cowberry is a low-growing evergreen shrub with small, leathery leaves. Its delicate bell-shaped flowers appear earlier in the year, followed by bright red berries that bring a wonderful splash of colour to the heathland. On Bennachie, it can be found from the wooded lower slopes to the much more exposed heath near the summits, where it thrives in fairly unforgiving conditions.
A Walk in the Correen Hills
Inspired by what I’d found the previous day, we headed to the Correen Hills on Sunday.
The route took us through rolling heather moorland towards Lord Arthur’s Hill, which reaches 518 metres. There were lots of familiar plants along the way, including more cowberry, blaeberry and cross-leaved heath, along with a solitary cottongrass head.
After around seven miles, we reached the little wooden hut tucked into an old quarry. My sister produced a flask of hot tomato soup and homemade cheese scones, which was pretty much the perfect lunch after a chilly walk.
From Cowberry Fieldwork to Botanical Painting
Back home, the reference material I’d gathered became part of the next stage of my cowberry painting. I had already spent time colour-matching, but seeing the plant growing on Bennachie and in the Correen Hills gave me a much better understanding of its natural habitat, scale and form. I began with a series of measured drawings, looking closely at the plant’s structure and how the stems, leaves, and berries relate to one another. I then scanned my drawings into Photoshop to experiment with the composition of the final painting. Working digitally at this stage makes it much easier to move individual elements around and try different arrangements without continually redrawing them.
I still like to work with full-size printed tracings, so I can see the composition at its actual scale before transferring anything to watercolour paper. It’s a bit of a hybrid process, combining traditional measured drawing with digital composition, but it gives me the flexibility to work things out before committing to the final piece.
You can see the finished cowberry botanical painting in my portfolio, created from the field observations, photographs and studies gathered during these walks.
A weekend in the hills, plenty of botanical references, and tomato soup with cheese scones. Not a bad way to celebrate a birthday.
