#agriculture
#botany + #botanie
#garden + #jardin
#art

You may not know that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Pomological Watercolor Collection is a digitized archive of 7.5K botanical illustrations. -- https://usdawatercolors.nal.usda.gov/pom/home.xhtml

And there's a Fediverse bot which posts one of these images every three hours. -- see fruit toots
@pomological

The high quality of this scientific illustration is noteworthy. You can see for yourself below.

The skill of the artist who painted a cross-section of a strawberry caught my eye -- maybe you'll be interested, too.

The fine detail in the thorns on the stem of the watercolor of a raspberry vine caused me to take a second look -- and only then did I notice the fine hairs on the raspberry leaves.

There are 3.8K watercolors of apples. Like me, maybe you're not really interested in the subject of apple varieties; but maybe there's another good reason to take advantage of this bot option.

HYPOTHESIS: Can I train my eyes to be more observant by simply looking at thousands of watercolors of apple skins?

THEORY: Each USDA artist used only skill and color to fool the eye into perceiving a curved surface instead of a flat plane. What would happen if I try in a casual way to figure out how this happens? Without really working at it, I'd guess that I'll probably get better at "seeing" subtle color variations in the apple skins. And over time, maybe this repeated practice will produce consequences in what I'm able to observe in the real world.

Just a thought. What do you think?