Illustration + Nature Sketching
Recently I’ve brought flowers home with me from my community garden, the last remnants of this summer. And what better way is there to celebrate these flowers than to sketch them. I found dahlias and borage, two very different but attractive plants, and so interesting to draw. These days, I find myself going back to … Read more
Welcome to my next sketchbook tour. It’s been a while since my last sketchbook tour, and now the summer is already over. So what did I sketch in the summer of 2023? Flowers, big landscapes, and a few more things. Here’s a video version of this sketchbook tour: Remember the final entry of my last … Read more
Today I’m going to share a flower painting tutorial for a beautiful blue and yellow iris. This demonstration is an outtake from my new course “Loose but Precise: Expressive and Simple Floral Paintings in Watercolor”. I sketch a yellow and blue iris in the technique the course is centered around: detailed and precise pencil lines with … 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 sketched a poppy flower over several days – starting with the closed bud that slowly unfolded to show the very thin and crinkly petals, then opened up to a full blooming poppy, which then fell apart pretty quickly and left only a seed pod. It was a fascinating process to watch and to … Read more
Here’s another sketchbook tour for the first quarter of 2023. Lots and lots of flowers, some travel sketching and a few larger landscapes. I’ve already shared bits and pieces from my recent sketchbook adventures on Mastodon. If you want to try out this non-commercial, ad-free social media site and would like to follow my work … 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
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
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
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 … Read more