Illustration + Nature Sketching
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 lines. …
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 …
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 …
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, …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
I‘ve been thinking a lot lately about creativity and overwhelm and how learning works, and so today I want to talk about why you, and I, for that matter, don‘t need another art course, or tutorial, or more inspiration to make better art. Here’s a video version of this post: Why you don’t need another …
As many of you know, I’ve been sketching orchids in the field last summer in several places, and I thought it would be nice to turn all my sketches into more finished artworks. In this post I wanted to share the process of doing this with you – in fact this has turned into quite …
At the end of every year I like to use the quieter days between the years for winding down, reading and for a bit of reflection: what did I do this year, what went well, what didn’t and what are my plans for the next year. I do this for my art (where it’s often …
My last sketchbook tour was a good while ago, so let’s see what I have been up to in since September. Not so much, alas, since I was first down with a common cold in October, and then caught Covid. I’ve recovered, but still have to take things slowly. This also shows in my sketchbook, …
From time to time I get the question: do I still manage to stay away from social media? After all, I deleted most of my social media accounts in 2019 (except for my Youtube channel), and I’ve done a few q&a’s about how I run my art business without the obligatory seeming Instagram and TikTok …
It’s been a while, everyone! As I’ve recovered from Covid (can’t recommend, wouldn’t buy again, zero stars), I’ve thought about a question from one of my wonderful students I got a while back. Anne asks: “I’d love to know how you balance your time as a working artist: I always struggle to balance art-work, art-learning …