Illustration + Nature Sketching
Between the last post and this one, spring has really arrived. One day it’s just a few blooming flowers here and there, and when you look around suddenly everything is full of fresh green leaves and you can’t see the birds in the trees anymore. I took the opportunity to sketch Japanese cherry blossoms and … Read more
Every spring, I’m waiting for the days finally getting brighter and warmer, and for the first small flowers to come out. This year we had quite the warm winter here in Germany, and a few of the spring flowers were already blooming in February. And now finally everything is sprouting and blooming – including the … Read more
I’ve mentioned and shown a few times now that I like to use fountain pens for sketching, but I haven’t really written about it yet in a dedicated post. Fountain pens are popular with many sketchers, and there are good reasons for it: they’re portable, refillable, flexible and then there’s the expressiveness of the linework. … Read more
I’m back from my spring break! During my vacation I visited a small zoo – I had planned to do some live drawing, but due to the weather it fell through, I only managed to get some rainy photos. But it was nice to sit down over the next days and recollect. I ended up … Read more
Painting white clouds is surprisingly easy with watercolor – you just paint around them with blue paint, let that dry and add a few cloud shadows as a second step. Today I have a short outtake for you from my cloud sketching course that shows the process in detail. Depending on your time and the … Read more
This week, the remake of my course on painting clouds is coming out, yay! I’m really happy with how it turned out, and I think it’s a definite upgrade to the last version. The course has an introduction on how to paint skies, lessons about choosing blues and how to get great mixes for clouds, … Read more
Welcome back to another sketchbook tour. Right now it seems like there’s nothing happening in my sketchbook at all – I’m busy with filming an online course (which means painting outside of the sketchbook), there’s an illustration project to finish, and I’m also still very slow – my health is only getting better in baby … Read more
Every few months, I do a few tweaks to my field sketching palette. Roughly every year, I do an update on the blog about it. I thought it might be fun to take a look at what I’ve changed lately. You can get a handy PDF of my current palette if you sign up for … Read more
I find winter is a great season to get started with painting skies and clouds – you can often see such intensive colors. With watercolor, painting skies can both be a very quick or a slow process – quick when you just add a few brush strokes to show a bit of blue, slow when … Read more
Shadows are a great way to show the form of your subject, they can help to make a sketch appear more three-dimensional. With light and shadow, you can shape and sculpt your drawing. So adding values (the degree of lightness or darkness of an object) is almost always a good idea. How do I add … Read more
Today I want to take a closer look at AI or machine learning from the perspective of an artist, and after taking a look at what this technology is and how it works and how it changes the creative community, I’m going to tell you how AI stole my own art and how I think … Read more
Just a quick announcement for those of you who are interested in a basic drawing course: I’m currently offering my foundational drawing course called “Sketching Fundamentals“. It comes in two different versions – as a self-directed course (you can start right away and go through the class at your own pace), or as a guided … Read more