To continue my exercises in observational drawings, I have started working on this mushrooms illustration a few weeks ago. It was partly inspired by Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life (which I have reading over the Winter) and also by my wife’s ongoing passion for mycology (she’s has been making some pretty amazing mushroom-inspired art herself).
This one is less researched than previous drawings. Nothing is at scale and these are not meant to depict real mushroom species (and even if they were, they would probably never grow together). Rather than doing realistic portraits of mushrooms, my goal was to capture some the amazing facts I’m learning about them: how the mushroom caps we normally see are just the tip of the iceberg of a vast underground network of interconnected hyphae. How fungi blurs our definition of ‘organism’, constantly growing and merging with each other. How they close the cycle of growth: feeding off dead trees and animals, but at the same time helping to feed the forest around them.
I think mushrooms may become my second favorite subject, after brains!
Here are some process pictures and details:
