Programs and Events

Join the author, interviewees and stakeholders at a reception and a panel discussion with Jennifer Bonnell, Dr India Young, Rod Silver and Briony Penn to learn more about the museum's newest publication Stewards of Splendour

Join the author Jennifer Bonnell and panelists Dr India Young, Rod Silver and Briony Penn to learn more about the museum's newest publication Stewards of Splendour

There are more than 3,000 different mushroom species in British Columbia. That’s more fungus diversity than anywhere else in Canada. Walk with us to nearby Beacon Hill Park where we’ll hunt for mushrooms with expert Andy MacKinnon, forest ecologist and co-author of Royal BC Museum’s best-selling handbook, Mushrooms of British Columbia.

Beatrix Potter was a woman of many interests and ambitions. However, we often come to know only one of these, her children’s books. Renowned for her fabulous Peter Rabbit storybook illustrations at the turn of the Century, Potter was also involved in the study of fungi (mycology) which inspired her land conservancy efforts in England’s Lake District later in life.

Join lecturer Spencer W. Stuart as he delves into Potter’s lesser-known involvement with the study of mycology through scientific illustration as well as writing. Now housed in the Armitt Museum in England and Perth Museum in Scotland, these beautifully executed and famously accurate watercolours continue to serve as reference to both amateur and expert mycologists alike.

Finally, he will discuss her enduring legacy to the conservation of the historic Lake District of North West England, revealing not only the familiar figure we have all come to know of imagination and fairy tale but also an enthusiastic, down-to-earth Naturalist caught up in the debates of the day.

Spencer W Stuart holds a Masters in the History of Art from the Courtauld Institute, UK, receiving the Director’s Award upon its completion. He then went on to work with Bonhams Auctioneers, focusing on Rare Books and Manuscripts in both their Toronto and New York offices. Spencer currently resides in Vancouver where he operates a collection management practice and serves as Chair of the Alcuin Society. He is the author of the recently published Contemporary Issues in Rare Book and Manuscript Collecting.

Join Jeri Engen for the entire series of four Sunday workshops

October 22 - Blotted line mushroom paintings
November 5 - Hand-coloured photographs
November 19 - Mixed-media bird paintings
December 3- Botanical gift tags and cards

Using ink, quill pen and watercolours, we will create artworks inspired by the film launch of Fungi: Web of Life at IMAX® Victoria. Blotted line combined drawing with basic printmaking. Blotted line enables an artist to create a variety of paintings using one sketch. By placing tracing paper over the sketch, the artist uses a fountain pen to ink over a small section of the sketch and then transfer the ink onto a second sheet by lightly pressing or  blotting  the two papers together. The process results in a dotted, broken and delicate line print that can be painted using watercolour.

Hand-colouring is as old as photography itself. In the 19th century, colour tinting was applied to early black-and-white prints to make them more closely resemble reality. It was the advent of colour films in the 1950s that took photographic hand-colouring techniques into the realm of interpretive artistic expression, which is where it lives today. Discover the history of the medium through the Royal BC Museum’s collection and then have the opportunity to create your own unique works of photographic art using black-and-white images from RBCM’s WWII era.

We will create a mixed-media artwork inspired by the Royal BC Museum’s bird collection. Beginning with found papers, we will use a variety of mediums, including acrylics, pastels, ink pens, and water-soluble graphite to build up a one of a kind original painting.

The Royal BC Museum botany collection consists of more than 215,000 dried plant specimens housed in our herbarium. The botany collection is one of the two largest reference collections of BC plants in the world and is frequently visited by researchers, consultants, government biologist, students and in this case, by interested members of the public. Using the collection for inspiration, we will use photocopy images to create simple watercolour images to make gifts tags and cards to share this holiday season.