Heidi Willis

Australian born, Heidi Willis is an entirely self-taught Natural History watercolour artist. Her work intricately illustrates our native and exotic plants, flowers, fruits and seed capsules, whilst her powerful & distinctive portraits of our spectacular bird life offers viewers an insight into the world as she experiences it. Painting full-time since 2003, Heidi quickly established herself as one of Australia’s emerging artistic talents. Her reputation as a leading natural history, wildlife and botanical artist is well established and her meticulous and intricate studies of botany and birds can be found in significant public and private collections around the world.

Heidi’s work has featured in prominent national and international exhibitions over her career. Highlights include The Waterhouse Natural History Art Prize six times to date, winning a Highly Commended award in the Works on Paper section in 2014 resulting in her work going on tour with the prize winning entries. Her major work St Vincent’s Amazons and Cannonball Tree has just been selected as a finalist again for the 2016 exhibition. The Waterhouse Natural History Art Prize is one of Australia’s most prestigious and richest art competitions held by the South Australian Natural History Museum. Several of her works have been showcased as a finalist at the Focus On Nature exhibitions, a leading international Natural History Art Prize held in the New York State Museum. Her work has also featured and won awards in both Botanica and The Margaret Flockton Award, hosted by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney.

Her work is held in the permanent collection at the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation PA, USA and her work has also been included in the highly regarded Shirley Sherwood Collection. Her work has also been featured in several publications, most significantly Better Homes and Gardens Magazine, Craft Arts Magazine, Colophon, SA Life, International Artist Magazine and Artist’s Palette Magazine multiple times over, with her work featured on the front cover of Artist’s Palette issue 123. In 2015 she was taken on by Australian Geographic as a freelance botanical illustrator where her work features in the Nature Watch section of the magazine.