Illustration + Nature Sketching
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
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
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 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 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
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
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