Botanical Illustration Courses and Teaching

Sally has a fund of training, experience and respect for her educational activities. Her  distance  learning courses on Introduction to Botanical Illustration and Watercolour Techniques are now available. Her book The Botanical Illustrators’ Handbook is a readable and comprehensive guide for botanical illustrators.  

She was Art Tutor at Kingston Maurward College, Dorset between 1999 and 2021, and a former tutor at the Eden Project, Cornwall and The Springhead Trust, Shaftesbury, Hillier Gardens, Romsey, King Henry's Walk Gardens Islington, Green and Away, Bransford, Worcester.
She was an invited demonstrator from 2002 to 2005 at Art in Action.

Sally does workshops for organizations at special request.

How to Book

The object of the Texture and Detail workshop (link below) is to provide additional information to your botanical specimens. While it is seldom desirable to put in a complete background, sometimes a little information about habitat or companion plants indicating where a specimen might be found is helpful. When drawing fungi for instance, forest floor debris of the kind found where the fungus occurs is helpful information. Additional information need not be in the same detail as the specimen. Preferably it should complement but not compete with it. This may sometimes involve blurring background information. This Youtube demonstration is a whole flora habitat landscape done to show the variation in approaches to accompanying vegetation depending on how distant it is to the main subject. There may also be some helpful pointers in it for watercolour landscape improvers.

Textures and Detail

Building tone

Painting hairs

Open Structures Botanical Art Workshop

Colour mixing and bleeding


Courses for 2024 at the Sir Harold Hillier Gardens:

Painting your Borders  --Sun 21st July  2024
A border looking its best is a source of inspiration for artists, but handling  the subject successfully needs planning and confidence.   The July workshop is designed to help, with a short morning of colour and composition theory and a long afternoon of practical painting in the gardens, with help from your tutor, Sally Pinhey.

Painting Fruits and Seeds --Sun   22nd September 2024

This is an ideal workshop for beginners and improvers alike.   The subjects provide scope for a range of skills from simple mastery of watercolour techniques to complex drawings of seed capsules.   The exploration of seed formation naturally follows the May workshop on pollination, strengthening connection with nature.

HOW TO BOOK