Michelle Annette Leveille has created botanical art in many styles. While she primarily uses foliage as a backdrop for her illustrations of animals, she is a fine botanical illustrator in her own right.
Lush foliage painted around orangutans to promote the new great ape exhibit at the Los Angeles Zoo
Learn more about what Michelle did at the Zoo here.
Early artwork such as the Red Apes of the Rain Forest billboard above used artistic license in placing animals among plants that were not native to their habitat. Later works were much more exacting in their requirements.
Poster depicting over 100 plants and animals native to Pinnacles National Park in California by Michelle Annette Leveille
The Los Angeles Zoo California Condor Rescue Team has been instrumental in bringing the large birds back from the brink of extinction. One of the main threats to the species is their propensity to consume microtrash such as bottle caps and bullet casings. Michelle Annette Leveille was contracted to create a poster for Los Angeles area schoolchildren that showed them the plants and animals of a native California habitat and the importance of cleaning up our litter to protect the animals who may be hurt by it.
Hand-painted murals in the L.A.I.R. exhibit at the Los Angeles Zoo
Michelle researched the preferred native plants of dozens of lizards, amphibians, insects, and reptiles to integrate accurate depictions of their environments around the world.
Eventually the Los Angeles Zoo became accredited as a Botanical Garden. Plant specimens were moved into groups such as the Australian Native Garden, and the Sonoma Desert Cactus Garden. Michelle made the identification signs for the various species and “interpretive signage” (signs with interesting facts) for the Cycad Garden. Here are some of the signs she made for the California Native Garden, and the Bird and Butterfly Gardens:
Plant identification signs illustrated by Michelle Annette Leveille for the Los Angeles Zoo and Botanical Gardens
These plant images were created digitally with a vector-based design program called Adobe Illustrator.
Michelle is also versed in the use of raster-based art programs such as Adobe Photoshop:
Flowering Yucca, and Photophilic Algae, both digitally painted by Michelle Annette Leveille using Adobe Photoshop
Read more about the Flowering Yucca illustration here.
Michelle also creates traditional botanical illustrations using fine art media such as ink, watercolor, gouache, and water-based oil paint.
Michelle was commissioned to paint this suggestive mushroom illustration in the classical style by a mushroom farmer who had a dream about his unborn child.
Mushroom illustration on antique paper by Michelle Annette Leveille.
Michelle enjoys the aesthetic and symbolic meaning of plants as decoration in artwork as well. For a long treatise on trees with typeface ligatures and local adaptations of William Morris’s Tree of Life, click here.
We have many other botanical illustrations to display, but they are scattered throughout the Artifact Graphics website according to whether they have animals on them or if they belong in other categories. Please contact Michelle if there is a certain botanical illustration style you’d like for your own custom artwork. We’d be happy to oblige with a free quote.
Contact Artifact Graphics
for original botanical art by Michelle Annette Leveille
