Fiurdelin Studio

Botanical illustration has been documenting the natural world for 300 years. It has never looked better on a living room wall.

My studio is on Lake Como, Italy, where the botanical tradition runs deep — from the Roman-era lemon gardens of the lakeside villas to the mountain meadows above the lake where alpine plants and butterflies have been documented by naturalists for centuries. I work from that landscape, and I work the old way: observe first, understand the structure, then draw.

I came to this through admiration — for Ehret's precision, Redouté's feeling for light, Merian's insistence on showing the living insect alongside the living plant. I try to follow what they taught. The tradition is the method.

Each illustration begins with a specific organism. Paeonia lactiflora 'Sarah Bernhardt', whose hundreds of petals arrange themselves in a precise geometric spiral that must be understood before it can be drawn convincingly. Papilio machaon, the Old World swallowtail, whose wings are semi-transparent in a way that demands a completely different approach from opaque-winged subjects. Amanita muscaria, whose white warts are fragments of the veil that enclosed the young mushroom before it pushed through the soil. The subject deter...

Biology and Chemistry to start, and Drawing as a completion.

among others...
Rosalia alpina at YICCA 2026, Centro Culturale di Milano, Milan (27 June to 11 July).
Amanita muscaria and Lucanus cervus at Boji hair+gallery, Shibuya, Tokyo (March).
Papilio machaon at the 16th Animals Exhibition, Light Space & Time, with an Honorable Mention and a top-twenty placing.
Pinguicula alpina in "Unusual," Association of Botanical Artists.
Rosalia alpina and Lucanus cervus in EXTINCTION: Save the Planet, Gallerium.
Bombus terrestris in Life Forms, Gallerium, presented on Artsy.