Illustration + Nature Sketching
Today I’d like to show you a small pen set that once belonged to my grandmother. For me it’s very special because of the stories and memories connected to it, even if I don’t use the pens a lot. Here’s a video version of this post: This pen set is very likely from the early … Read more
Winter has come here in Germany, and as the leaves have disappeared and the snow is falling, I can do one of my favorite activities again: watching and sketching birds from the window. I find the colder months are a great time to watch birds, they are more visible in nature, and they tend to … Read more
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 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
I recently got a small landscape-themed palette from Kremer Pigments and today I’m going to test it and paint a small landscape sketch with it. Kremer is a family-owned German company for pigments, paints and all kinds of materials for the restoration of traditional artworks. They specialize in historical and rare pigments, like real lapislazuli, … 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
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
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 … 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