Botanical Watercolor Illustrations
The illustrations for FloraVista keep growing, and I couldn’t be happier about it. Following the first post-launch batch, here is the second set of watercolor plant illustrations completed for the botanical garden card game—now fully funded and moving toward production after its remarkable Kickstarter campaign.
If you’re just joining this project, FloraVista is a cozy, strategy-driven card game in which players curate their own botanical garden using 120 beautifully illustrated plants from around the world. The game raised over $41,000 from 476 backers and hit its funding goal in just 45 minutes. Late pledges are still being accepted at the FloraVista Kickstarter page, well worth checking out if you haven’t already.
Each illustration follows the same established approach: watercolor paintings that pair a full study of the plant with smaller detail insets highlighting something botanically distinctive about that species. Here’s a look at this batch.
African Oil Palm (Elaeis guineensis)
One of the batch’s most striking compositions, the African Oil Palm is rendered as a full, towering palm tree with gracefully arching fronds that fill the panel with lush green. The detail insets are particularly fascinating, a dense, dramatic fruit bunch at the base of the tree showing the tightly packed red-brown palm fruits, alongside individual fruits cut open to reveal their vivid interior. It’s a plant with remarkable visual range from the serene canopy above to the rich, almost jewel-like fruit below.
Blackberry Lily (Iris domestica)
A delightful plant with a somewhat misleading name. The Blackberry Lily is neither a blackberry nor a lily, but a member of the iris family. The illustration captures both phases of this plant’s story beautifully: the bright, spotted orange flowers with their distinctive freckled petals shown in full bloom alongside the seed pod stage, where the spent bloom gives way to a cluster of glossy black seeds that give the plant its common name. The long, blade-like leaves anchor the composition with confident strokes of deep green.
Chervil (Anthriscus cerefolium)
Chervil gets one of the batch’s most atmospheric treatments. The delicate, feathery foliage — so fine it almost dissolves into the background — is painted with a soft, misty quality that suits this subtle herb perfectly. The flat-topped white flower clusters float above the lacy leaves, and a single dark seed pod is shown as a detail inset, underscoring the botanical completeness that makes each FloraVista card so satisfying. The cool, pale background gives this illustration a quiet elegance that stands apart from the more colorful entries in the batch.
Hyssop (Hyssopus officinalis)
Hyssop is a plant that rewards a close look, and the illustration gives it exactly that. Two views work in tandem here: a rounded, full shrub covered in dense spikes of soft purple-blue blooms shows the plant as you’d encounter it in a garden, while a single elegant stem study below captures the structure, the whorled leaf arrangement, and the flower spike in precise botanical detail. The combination of the wide view and the close study is one of the most effective compositions in the batch.
Southern Magnolia (Magnolia grandiflora)
A personal favorite from this batch, and perhaps from the entire project so far. The Southern Magnolia illustration is pure lushness,a large, creamy white bloom with golden stamens at its center, surrounded by the magnolia’s characteristic glossy dark leaves, rendered with a richness and depth that almost feels three-dimensional. Below the flower study, a full magnolia tree in its natural form shows the plant at scale, its dense, rounded canopy dotted with blooms and small red seeds scattered nearby as a botanical detail. For anyone who grew up in the American South, this one is going to hit differently.
Each new batch of illustrations for FloraVista deepens my appreciation for the plant kingdom and the project itself. There’s something genuinely meditative about this work. The patience required to render each leaf, each petal, each seed with care and accuracy. More batches are on the way as the game moves toward production.
