Time flies

© Niki Simpson

Incredible though it seems to me, I find that I have now been creating these digital botanical images for over ten years, so why a new name and website? The answer is twofold.

Firstly, there is another Niki Simpson website which is completely unrelated to botany or plants, and secondly, since my work is unacceptable in group botanical art shows and exhibiting solo is prohibitively costly, I had been looking to find new ways to exhibit my work. I realised that I could take another route, and try to demonstrate the flexibility and potential of my botanical images to an online audience. So I hope to take advantage of the developments in website technology and use this new Visual Botany website to embrace social media, to use a blog to explain and demonstrate some of the advantages of this type of image and to showcase a range of uses for which these images have been, or could be, used.

I set out ten years ago to see what benefits new technologies could bring to illustrating plants for scientific purposes, in order to support botanists in their work in the future and I hope to continue in that direction, to experiment and improve my images. But for the moment, I feel it is time to mark the end of a an amazing, yet at times difficult, decade, thank Peter Barnes for setting up and maintaining my previous website for so many years, and now step up to the plate and learn how to manage a website myself …… and look forward to the next decade.