BIO

Awarded a Gold Medal for Banksia serrata series at the Royal Horticultural Society’s 2024

Botanical art and photography show in London.

Awarded the Celia Rosser Medal for botanical art at The Art of Botanical Illustration

exhibition – 2024, Melbourne.

Anne Hayes studied commercial art in Brisbane and received her diploma in 1992. Majoring

in illustration she was awarded honours for her portfolio, which was also adjudged the

Portfolio of the Year. While completing her studies, Anne worked in a Brisbane commercial

art studio.

That was before computers entered the world of graphic design and illustration. Anne did a

lot of black and white illustration using Rotring pens on illustration board. All their colour

work was either in watercolour or gouache for traditional illustration and acrylic for air

brushing. After three years working in the commercial art studio, Anne moved to New

Zealand where she settled in Queenstown on the shores of Lake Wakatipu. There Anne

concentrated on the fine-art side of things. painting portraits on commission and producing

landscape paintings in oils on canvas for dealer galleries on both North and South islands.

But, after 10 years, the homesickness became too much she moved back to Brisbane and

commenced an advanced diploma in visual communication. The course gave her all the

skills necessary to negotiate the digital revolution. Now she was equipped with updated

computer knowledge in Adobe Creative Suite and programs such as Illustrator, Photoshop,

InDesign, Dreamweaver and Flash.

Anne worked as a project designer in educational publishing and among lots of design work

she also illustrated eight children’s storybooks. Some of these were executed in watercolour

but most were produced using Illustrator. But after attending the annual show of the Society

for Growing Australian Plants in 2010, Anne’s creative life was to change forever. She

became fascinated with botanical illustration and has not looked back since. She came

across a stall run by the Botanical Artists Society of Queensland and duly took one of their

beginner courses in botanical drawing. From that time on botanical art became her passion.

In 2014 Anne was running her own freelance illustration business where she has a strong

preference for botanical subjects. And to make the most of the creative and illustrative

potential of such subject matter she resorts to her favourite medium – that most traditional

one, watercolour.

Anne has completed several assignments on botanical themes for the Australian

Geographic two spreads for Nature Watch on banksias and edible plants, a poster on

Australia’s orchids and illustrations of Banksias for the 2013 Australian Geographic Art

Calendar.