Illustration + Nature Sketching
I don’t often write these kind of reflective posts to wrap up the year, but since I usually do a personal recap just for myself at the end of each year, I thought this time I could share a part of it. Looking back 2021 was a very challenging, tough year for all of us, …
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about psychological well-being, probably because the pandemic is slowly chiseling away a lot of my carefully learnt coping strategies for difficult life situations. It’s a real challenge – especially in the winter months. And yet, every time I put pencil to paper, or hold up my pair of binoculars …
Today I want to give you a short breakdown of how to get started with sketching birds. I’ve already talked your ear off with reasons to start bird-watching and how to get started with birding, so sketching birds could be the next step! Why sketch birds? The short answer to this is: because it’s a …
My 20 year old self would be very surprised to hear this: Birding is a wonderful pastime that I somehow never get tired of, and I see something new each day. I wrote a little ode to bird-watching just the other week as an introduction to this post. So if you want to know more …
Winter is approaching quickly, and with it the leaves are falling from the trees. That means a whole bunch of activities is over for this year – observing bees, butterflies, flowering plants, mushrooms, and many more. Winter just puts its drab foggy hibernation coat over almost everything. Almost, because as every year suddenly I start …
Welcome to part two of this sketchbook tour with detailed nature studies. Part one can be found here. Here’s a video version of this post: Sketchbook Tour Fall ’21: Detailed nature studies (plants, birds, bats) | part 2 (video) Starting with common flax (Linum usitatissimum) I explored a number of meadow and field flowers. Flax …
I’m currently working on a larger project of painting wildlife and plant illustrations for several information boards about local habitats. To prepare and learn more about some of the species I’m creating study pages in my sketchbook – several small studies of the species in questions, preferably from different angles, with additional notes and information, …
I can see a large walnut tree from my window. Each fall, the local crows and jays find creative ways to get hold of and feed on the walnuts and it’s a lot of fun to watch them. Corvids are highly intelligent birds, and it’s fascinating to observe how they apply different methods to open …
Here’s the next video from my landscape sketching series about folk tale landscapes. There is something incredibly eerie and unsettling about solitary houses in the woods. Even as someone who grew up in a small mountain town in the midst of a lot of weird buildings, I always found it a bit creepy to pass …
Here’s another one of my bird drawings in ink, this time a raven. I showed how I explore this technique a few weeks ago with the ink drawing of a duck. With a bird that’s all black you have to decide where to put lighter and darker areas, so that you still can show some …
I think it is always interesting to see which tools other artists use, and today I want to take a closer look at my favorite drawing tools. I don’t really switch my drawing gear that often once I’ve found a pen that I like. Here’s a video version of this post: My favorite drawing tools …
Color theory can appear difficult as there is no absolute rule for identifying a color as either warm and cool – color and temperature perception is something individual. Yet warm-cool relationships are essential to our visual system – our eyes use change in color temperature to help us understand objects in space. And there are …
From time to time I like to change my tools a bit and I wanted to try out how I can use my preferred fountain pen ink with a brush. This ink is waterproof, so you can work several layers on top of each other even on drawing paper. What better subjects are there than …
The last year has been a year of using up paints for me, so I changed the colors on my palettes quite a bit. I didn’t post every single change in my palette, but now I have more or less settled into a palette setup that I like: I have one small field kit for …
Here’s the next video from my landscape sketching series about folk tale landscapes. This sketch is all about how light falls through trees, and I wanted to see what it looks like when painted. I feel like this is all I really need to say. I love complex lighting situations like this, unfortunately they are …