Illustration + Nature Sketching
I’m excited to announce my new class “Loose & Luminous Watercolor: Create Atmospheric Mini Landscapes” is now published! In this playful class, we are going to explore how to create atmospheric mini landscapes in a loose watercolor technique, with a touch of detail added with colored pencil. Sunrise, fog and backlight create a unique mood …
When we think about landscape painting, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer variety of colors out there. Today I just want to share a little bit of “behind the scenes” fun that shows my different landscape sketching palettes, and I want to talk about how downsizing your selection of colors can actually lead …
Yellow is a useful part of any landscape painting palette, whether it’s as a pure, bright color or a more muted earth yellow. I personally like to have one from each group so that I can decide if I need a slightly more saturated or less intense yellow. For a very minimal palette of 3-5 …
Skies aren’t just blue. They constantly change colors over time and with weather conditions. Capturing that complexity in your landscape sketches can feel less daunting if you have a few go-to color combinations that can be used for a variety of atmospheric effects and moods, like sunrise, clouds, overcast weather, fog. Here are some of …
Hey everyone, you haven’t heard from me in quite a while. I hope you all have landed well in the new year. Thank you for your kind messages, I’ve read them all. A few personal notes about my absence first:My life has been on hold in the last two months. I’m very sorry I didn’t …
Today I have another quick sketching tutorial of a café scene in a park. Just wanted to mention before the tutorial starts: I realize I haven’t posted in a while. My life is a bit chaotic right now, and I miss writing and making art a lot. I’m still working on finishing the landscape course, …
Neutral colors play a very important role in painting, the give our more saturated colors meaning and a bit of room to breathe. If you create a sketch with only the intense, candy-colored saturated versions of colors, you’ll quickly overwhelm the sketch, and your viewer. Neutrals colors can help with that. A lot of the …
Here’s a landscape sketch of a calm lake scene in a park, I thought it might be fun to see what my process for this was. Currently I don’t sketch directly on location, but I know the area well, and how I approach these sketches would be very similar to my process when sketching outside. …
Photo references can be a good tool for sketchers if you know how to use them.I had planned this as a part of my post about bird sketching, but I find it’s important enough for a separate post. The usefulness of internet image searches has massively gone down in recent years due to AI-generated nonsense, …
Recently I’ve been exploring more ways to use the new pigments I’m testing, and a great way to see how they perform is to paint skies and cloudscapes with them – typically you use lots of water and wet-into-wet techniques for those. Here’s the post on the specific pigments in case you missed it. Skies …
I’ve been testing a few new pigments for landscape sketching in the small Compuzzle palette that I showed in the last post (not a recommendation by the way). But for these small amounts of paint the palette was nice. To see the pigments that I usually use for all of my sketching (including landscapes), here’s …
I’ve been using a new palette with a slightly different pigment selection recently. This is not aimed to replace my current palette, but a way for me to Let’s start with the palette: the Mungyo Compuzzle modular palette was a random find at my local art supply dealer (they’ve since discontinued it, lol, and I …
Although I love sketching birds I’ve not drawn any for quite a while – time to change that again. Here’s a look at how I designed a page of bird sketches, featuring a black redstart. We have a lovely black redstart (or several?) in the neighborhood. It’s a small flycatcher (Eurasian variety) that’s slightly smaller …
A lot of you asked me (on my new idea + feedback board) how I design and layout my sketchbook pages, and if I can give more drawing tips around them. I’m happy to do that. I’ll start with a page of botanical sketches – flowers that grow on my balcony in summer. I’ve just …
I’m still enjoying my loose morning sketching sessions – there’s a family of magpies hopping around the neighborhood that make for very entertaining models. I found that doing these loose warm-ups directly in the morning also takes away some of the stress I’ve been feeling and helps me to be more mindful. Maybe it even …