Illustration + Nature Sketching
In this post I want to give you a simple guide on how you can learn to draw anything. You don’t need any special skills or talent for drawing and sketching when you start, it just takes a bit of practice and the desire to learn. For an extended free PDF guide on how to … Read more
Today I’m excited to announce a new course: I focused a lot on big, loose floral paintings during this spring and summer, an activity with lots of flowing paint and big brush strokes, and I thought this would be a nice addition to my existing botanical sketching course that’s focused a bit more on the … Read more
I’ve recently experimented with a self-made bamboo pen after being reminded what nice lines it can create. Making your own reed pen or bamboo pen is easy, inexpensive and fun. In this post I’ll show you how you can make one and how to use it. Here’s a video that shows you how to make … Read more
In the last step by step, I showed a quick approach with ink. There’s also a more detailed way for approaching botanical sketches. For this demonstration, I’ll show how I use pencil and watercolor to create a balanced combination of precise linework, flowing watercolor washes and a few defining textures. I call this method “loose … Read more
This week in my live botanical sketching course we’re taking a closer look on colors and mixing. It’s useful to know a few basic terms and rules, and to have an understanding of how you can mix colors. These mixes were done with watercolor, but can be produced with all kinds of media. Primary colors … Read more
I’ve been sketching lots of flowers lately and as we’re starting the live version of Introduction to Botanical Sketching this week (you can still join the feedback group!) I thought I’d share a bit more of my process for quick botanical sketches. Plants are a great subject to draw for beginners, as they are very … Read more
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
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
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
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