With dulcet tones, Ann Payne softly offers encouragement and technical tips to students intensely working at their easels.

Holding a flower in one hand, she says, "So remember when you draw these, you're going to start where?"

"At the bottom," one student answers, bringing a smile to the teacher's face.

Ms. Payne, 69, of Morgantown teaches Botanic Drawing I and II at Phipps Garden Center in Shadyside, sharing the basics of drawing flora and fauna. Her classes are filled with an eclectic mix of men and women from diverse backgrounds and of all ages. In this advanced class, there is a microbiologist, interior designer, grant writer and more. Many students haven't had a drawing class since sixth grade.

"I always ask them, 'Why are you taking this class?' Usually plants are some common thread. Certainly, it's not art background," says Ms. Payne.

She starts with the fundamentals, which for this group means using pencils to replicate an alstroemeria flower. There are no colorful blooms unfolding on paper.

"Underneath every beautiful botanical painting is an absolute black-and-white rendering," she says.

Alstroemeria is very common, but the budding artists are asked to look at the flower with a new, critical eye.

"They walk by them every time they go to Giant Eagle," says Ms. Payne. "But once you start to draw things, you see them in an entirely different way. It's an ongoing joy."

The 10 students start by drawing stems and petals before moving on to the leaves.

"John Ruskin said if you can paint a leaf, you can paint the world," the teacher says with a grin.

"It's taught like a simple language: You learn the alphabet first. You learn about pencils, papers and we talk about the gray scale. They learn to articulate that, and we build to applying that to abstract geometric objects. Then we graduate to real things. It's very graspable."

Dave Steidl of Highland Park is a graphic artist who learned to draw as a college student in the late 1960s and was looking for a way back to traditional techniques.

"Most of my waking hours are in front of a computer now," he says with a laugh. "I want to get back to pencil and paper. I just wanted to improve my skills."

He looks up at the flower then back again at his paper, trying to duplicate the delicate details of stems, leaves and blooms.

"For me the reward is to be able to translate onto a piece of paper a beautiful image of what I'm looking at," he says.

Jackie McDonough of Hazelwood says she has long dreamed of drawing flowers and other plants "because they are so complex and yet they are so ordered."

"They are so varied. You could paint every one and never come to the end of possibilities."

As Ms. Payne walks around the room, she engages each student, gently critiquing and giving advice. Holding a deep orange daisy in her hand, she shows each student the complicated structure of a composite flower.

"You look at it a thousand times and when you start drawing it, all of a sudden you see it for the first time," she tells them.

In her 10 years of teaching at Phipps, she's had many students who doubted they could ever master the skills of a botanical artists. She has the same message for each one:

"Yes you can, yes you can."

Doug Oster writes a blog, "Growing With Doug," exclusively at PG+, a members-only web site of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.