Illustration + Nature Sketching
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
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
Keeping a regular sketchbook practice can be hard, and I’d like to take a quick look at the aspects that were most helpful for me – things that made returning to my sketchbook easier. Here’s a video version of this post: Keep it ready You can have the nicest tools available, but when they are … 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
I recently went on vacation, and of course I took a few sketching tools with me. I always try to keep my tools very lightweight and minimal, and I thought it might be interesting to share what I took with me on the trip. A few years ago I shared a similar sketching kit (My … 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
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 linework. … Read more