Penny Brown has always worked as a professional artist, first as a theatre designer, creating scenery and costumes for productions all over Britain. She then turned to illustration, including books on craft, lifestyle, gardening and natural history.
She graduated from the Society of Botanical Artist's Distance Learning Course with a Distinction, winning the Award for Excellence. She is now a tutor on this course, and her best-selling book, Botanical Drawing (Search Press 2018), is a set text. She also leads botanical drawing workshops and runs an online drawing correspondence course which has students from around the world.
She has exhibited regularly in London, the South-West, Frankfurt, Madrid, and in her Dorset studio. In 2014 her painting 'Grape Hyacinth' was on loan to the Museo Centro de Gaias in Santiago de Compostela and was featured in the International Botanical Art Exhibition in South Korea.
Brown works in watercolour and graphite 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 are a constant source of inspiration which she loves to share.