Penny Brown

Penny has always worked as a professional artist, first as a theatre designer and then as an illustrator of books on craft, gardening and natural history. The latter fascinated her and in 2009 she enrolled on the Distance Learning Course with the Society of Botanical Artists. She is now a Fellow of the Society and a tutor on the course, where her best-selling book, Botanical Drawing (Search Press 2018), is a set text. Penny works in watercolour, graphite and coloured pencil, creating images that are botanically accurate and visually pleasing. Her prize-winning collage work involves cutting and layering plain papers in a complex, subtle way to achieve an effect reminiscent of 1930s silk screen prints, but with strong contemporary appeal. The natural world and the glorious Dorset countryside are a constant source of inspiration. She exhibits regularly in London and the South-West and she is represented by The Gallery at Sculpture by the Lakes. Her work has been shown in Frankfurt and Madrid, and in 2014 her painting ‘Grape Hyacinth’ was loaned to the Museo Centro de Gaias in Santiago de Compostela. Her recent book, ‘Paint 50 Flowers in Watercolour' with Search Press, is a beginners guide to flower painting.