Illustration + Nature Sketching
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
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 … 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
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
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
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
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: https://youtu.be/oLhsJ–oY68 I think it’s in … 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
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 … Read more