Identifying Agrocybe praecox. Illustration by Angela Mele
After graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Florida State University, I wasn’t sure what to do next. That’s when I found mushrooms — chanterelles, to be exact! In the summer they covered the hills in the woods near my house. As I flipped through pages of beautiful illustrations in my mom’s 1987 Peterson Field Guide to Mushrooms, I not only determined that I was sitting on a pile of gold, I also fell in love with fungi and realized I wanted to paint them for a living.
With no fungus club in Tallahassee I had only banana spiders to contend with as I filled basket upon basket with beautiful orange mushrooms. Two years later, I’m finishing up a degree in Science Illustration at CSU Monterey Bay. In the program we learn how to create informative, accurate, and beautiful illustrations. My dream is to work with mycologists to create
a field guide to mushrooms.
Illustrations by me and my classmates can be seen in the exhibit Illustrating Nature at the Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History until June 5, 2010.
