Penny Brown trained and worked as a theatre designer for ten years before an increasing love of painting and drawing led her to illustration. She has illustrated many books on craft, textiles, design, natural history and gardening. The latter especially started to fascinate 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 – A Step-by-Step Guide’ (Search Press 2018), is a set text.  She also leads botanical drawing workshops.

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 particularly the glorious Dorset countryside is a constant source of inspiration which she loves to share.

She exhibits regularly with SWSBA and all around the South-West, including in her Dorset studio, and she is represented by The Gallery at Sculpture by the Lakes.  Her work has been shown with the SBA in London, Frankfurt and Madrid, and in 2014 her painting ‘Grape Hyacinth’ was loaned to the Museo Centro de Gaias in Santiago de Compostela.

Her most recent book, ‘Paint 50 Flowers in Watercolour’ has just been published by Search Press and is a beginners’ step-by-step guide to flower painting.

She exhibits her botanical paintings and drawings with The Society of Botanical Artists in London, Frankfurt and Spain. She has won several awards, including the prestigious President’s Prize at the SBA exhibition in 2015. She exhibits with The South West Society of Botanical Artists and opens her studio regularly for Dorset Art Weeks. She has recently written and illustrated a book on pencil drawing for Search Press. She looks forward to continuing her parallel careers in botanical art and illustration.