Philippine native flora for Tala’s Nature Rescue
I illustrated 15 species of plants and trees for a card game called Tala’s Nature Rescue. It’s a 40 card deck with trivia and illustrations of some of the Philippines’ beautiful and threatened flora.
Some of the plants I drew included Rafflesia, Waling-waling, and my favorite tree from Mindanao the Bagras or Rainbow Gum. My initial challenge for this project was to create art without the usual cute faces that I like to add to animals and plants. It’s something I do to make the art more engaging. To work without faces meant I had to somehow make up for them with additional details.
Luckily the art turned out more engaging than I thought even without the cute beady eyes and smiles. By giving more attention to the details of the plants I got to appreciate nature’s own display of colors and shapes. Take for example the Waling-waling. Each flower has a unique face so-to-speak, perhaps not made up of eyes or mouths, but of varying shades of pink and green, and pedals of different shapes and sizes. The flower of the Waling-waling is as beautiful as it is complicatedly detailed!
My personal favourite is the Bagras, which demands just as much detailed attention to its colorful bark. As the Bagras sheds its bark, it reveals a layer of color underneath. As this layer is exposed to air, it ages into different colors like red, orange, blue, pink and purple. I usually illustrate trees with cute faces, especially in the past for the Haribon Foundation. But since I didn’t have to for this project, I was free to add colors where I wanted without worrying where the eyes and mouth would be.
This was fun to work on and look forward to making more. Along with myself, other artists were recruited to contribute such as beautifully-detailed art by Anina Rubio, Alessandra Lanot, and Ninna del Mundo.
Here’s little Leia sharing some of the cards in the deck!