Yup. We’re all still stuck in the house. And it’s snowing. Sometimes. And it’s 60 degrees. Sometimes. And everything seems awful. Much of the time. But at least we can see the flowers on our daily walks. And through the windows.

*dramatic sigh*

But wait! You can bring spring to you with Wendy Hollender’s The Joy of Botanical Drawing: A Step-by-Step Guide to Drawing and Painting Flowers, Leaves, Fruit, and More.

“Shiri,” I hear you saying, in an urgent whisper, “I’m not that great of an artist…”

Nor I. If you could already do the thing, you wouldn’t need a guide.

The Joy of Botanical Drawing is an absolutely gorgeous book that takes you through the process of outlining, shading, and adding color to nature’s beautiful designs, starting with the foundations of simple shapes such as spheres, cones, and rectangles and building outward with curves, arcs, and shadows until you’ve created a pear, halved tomato, or mum with depth, shading, and perspective.

The book is perfectly organized to assist you in your efforts to create that shiny, tempting apple or bewitching, velvety iris. In the introduction, Hollender explains how to use The Joy of Botanical Drawing to establish a regular practice (which, as with any skill, is the most important bit) and, in the first official chapter, she recommends specific materials that may be of use.

With each successive chapter, she introduces a successively more complex skill, building on what you’ve already learned to add detail and naturalism to your renditions of leaves, stems, thorns, petals, and buds. I like that the progression is a layered one with each new skill building on the previous one; an apt analogy would be, say, an anatomical drawing in which you started with a vague outline of the body and eventually arrived at freckles and individual hairs – but gradually filling in all the structures and details in between.

Big leaps, at least in my limited artistic experience, mean frustration. A lot of frustration, and it tends to transform things that are supposed to be fun into chores. Little hops are more easily consumed and integrated and also allow the budding artist to experience more victories in the form of visible progress.

We want victory! We want progress!

I mean, the last thing any of us needs right now is another chore.

Another element of The Joy of Botanical Drawing I appreciate is the breadth of shapes Hollender explores. Not only does this allow the student (that’s you) to try their hand at a garden’s worth of shapes and fill the walls they’ve been staring at for weeks with wondrous variety, it also allows them more opportunities to stick with their practice if a particular shape or shading/color effort proves… elusive. And by elusive, I mean you end up primal screaming and tearing the paper into tiny shreds and throwing them at someone.

As someone who enjoys drawing but isn’t particularly good at it, I can verify that some forms and lines and attempts simply don’t stick. If you don’t have options immediately available, quitting is easy. If you can flip back through the pages, though, and find a simpler subject or skip ahead and find one that better suits your style, you’re more likely to persevere and, maybe, find your groove.

A few reminders from someone who’s tried their hand at various forms of art over the years: it’s likely that when you open The Joy of Botanical Drawing, you’ll just be starting your botanical drawing journey. You bought this book because you want to learn from an expert. So don’t compare your work to hers. No one expects you to be Da Vinci the minute you pick up a pencil or even after drawing your way through a whole book, except you. Knock that crap off. This is supposed to be fun. Let it be fun.

Caveat #2: Artistic hobbies can be pricey. Some of them require specialized equipment, whereas for others, certain things are only recommended. Hollender recommends specific materials, and if you feel like investing, awesome. Do it. If you don’t have the funds, however, or if you don’t want to shell out the cash (or if you’ve done some other kind of drawing and prefer watercolor markers or pastels or chalk or colored pencils), that’s fine. You’ll figure out how to adapt.

This is is your light in the disaster. Do with it what you will.

The Joy of Botanical Drawing by Wendy Hollender is available now from Watson-Guptill, an imprint of Ten Speed Press (Crown Publishing Group).