My first online video class

I am thrilled to launch my first online video class “Sketching Landscapes in Pen, Ink and Watercolor” today (on my birthday!) at Craftsy.com. The course is 2.5 hours long, and in seven lessons we cover all the steps I use when I’m sketching in the field. We start with a peek through my sketchbooks (yes, I carried them all to Denver in my suitcase!) and a glance at the materials I use on location. From there we journey to the Flatirons in Boulder at sunrise to work on composition and value sketches. Back in the studio, I go through the step-by-step painting of different types of skies, and then draw and paint the Flatirons scene, along with other common landscape elements such as trees and foregrounds, adding in texture and darks along the way. I hope that breaking it all down into steps will make it easy enough for any viewer to try out the steps on their own.

It was an interesting and exhilarating experience to create this course, but I couldn’t have done it without the help and guidance of all the talented people at Craftsy. In preparation, I had to really think through the steps of how I work, and this helped immensely during the shoot. You’ll find plenty of great shots of my palette, so you can see how I mix colour for each scene and how different types of pens create texture. If you haven’t seen the Craftsy platform yet, you’ll be impressed by the way it works. You can speed up or slow down the video, make notes, ask me questions, post your projects and see what other students are working on. As an instructor, it’s an interactive experience for me too, since I can answer individual questions and give feedback on projects (it’s almost like being in one of my summer workshops). And once you buy the class, you can watch it as often as you like. If you register through my blog, there’s even a special discount.

Register for the class at the discount rate!

Since this is the start of my summer sketching season, I’ll be posting new sketches on the projects page too. I’m thrilled with how my online class turned out and I look forward to seeing your projects. So get out there and do some landscape sketching!

Variety in greens

A few weeks ago someone asked if I could write a post about mixing greens. This pond scene seems like a good place to start.

There are really two parts to this answer. The first has to do with the pigments you use and the second with how you vary the greens in the scene. Let’s start with the pigments. Are you using tube/premixed greens? Sap Green would be an example of this. Or do you make your own greens from mixing yellow and blue? I do a bit of both. I have Azo Green (a lighter, more acid-looking green), Sap Green and Phthalo Green on my palette. I use them all, as well as mix my own greens from yellow and blue. I like the more natural greens that I can achieve from the mixes, and the combos I use most frequently for that are Azo Yellow and Ultramarine Blue, Azo Yellow and Indanthrene Blue, and Quinacridone Gold and Indanthrene Blue.

The reason I use so many combos to mix greens has to do with the second part of the answer. I want variety when a scene is dominantly green. I want some greens to be greyish (like the second layer of foliage below), some to be yellowish (like the grasses in the front of the pond) and some to be dark (like the shapes between the leaves). I can’t get that variety with one tube of green. If you notice, I’ve added some red in the foliage too, which— because it’s the complementary colour to green — really enlivens the greens.

And a little reminder: today is the last day to enter the draw to win my online video class “Sketching Landscapes in Pen, Ink and Watercolor” for free on the website Craftsy.com. Here’s the link: http://www.craftsy.com/ext/ShariBlaukopf_Giveaway Hopefully I’ll be announcing the lucky winner very soon.

Overhead

I always get a little antsy when I haven’t been out to draw in a few days and even though I knew rain was coming, I went out to sketch at the boat club, knowing that I might enjoy a little drama. From where I was sitting, what was most remarkable was the white of the masts against those darkening trees and sky. As you can see, the rain came down so quickly that I never was able to complete the bottom part of the sketch because I couldn’t see out of the window. The white lines of the rigging are done with a gel pen that I keep in my bag because white paint applied with a brush is just never fine enough.

Castle in the mist

It probably would have been wise to listen to the weatherman this morning. He said the rain would stop around noon but… there was a light mist falling when I left my house so it seemed that the rain would be over at any moment. When I joined the Tuesday Plein Air group I was surprised to see that I wasn’t the only optimist. There were five of us who spent the morning painting in that mist at Cap St. Jacques Nature Park. It was an interesting process to work on this sketch of Chateau Gohier which I did on Fabriano Hot Press paper. Normally this paper dries faster than you want it to, but today I couldn’t get it to dry at all. That made for perfect texture on the stones. If you look carefully you’ll see the marks from the mist. It’s almost like I used a fine spray bottle. Even the ink lines are somewhat runny from drawing on the damp paper.

The approach I took with this was a bit like what I will be teaching at the Urban Sketchers Symposium in Singapore in July. My workshop is called Big Brush Colour and in it I’ll be demonstrating this very technique. The first wash I did on this was one that covered the entire building. With my big mop brush I painted that first layer of colour in the stone, varying the wash as I went along. Later on I came in with darker colour in the roof, under the turret and in the individual stones, but it is really that one first big brush wash that ties it all together. The paper remained damp long after I got back to my car, and from what I hear about the humid weather in Singapore in July, I may have the same drying issues as I had today. There’s still time to register for the Symposium if you are interested!

New Bonaventure

Last summer I visited both coasts of Canada and despite doing lots of sketching, I didn’t get much painting done. Now that teaching is over for the semester I have a bit of time to revisit some of the scenes that I never got around to painting. New Bonaventure, Newfoundland, is where The Grand Seduction was filmed. If you saw the movie, you’ll remember Taylor Kitsch arriving in this bay by boat while the whole town plays cricket on the upper green. It’s quite a spectacular setting with the dark hills behind.

In my studio paintings I’ve been trying to work in larger formats which makes the work too big to scan. This was photographed, which is a production in itself. Getting the right lights, balancing the colour, setting up a tripod… it takes about as long to do as it does to paint the watercolour. Painted on Fabriano Artistico CP, 140 lb, 30″ x 20″.

Sailing shapes

When I looked at this scene early this morning the first thing I thought was “how do I make sense of this confusion?” I’ve painted it before — last summer, and the summer before — but not in the early morning like this and perhaps with fewer boats in the bay. If you think about it, it’s impossible to draw in all the details on the boats, unless of course you have all day and besides, why draw details that you can just as easily add in with a brush? In a scene like this there are three repeating motifs: the sail covers, the masts and the shapes of the foreground boats. The rest is just filler. Bits of lights and darks between those shapes that convey more rows of boats.

So here’s what I did. I drew the foreground boats, the sail covers, the horizon line and the line of trees. When it came time to paint, I started with the sky and water and left a good chunk of unpainted (white) shapes in the middle. If you look carefully, there are no boats behind that first row. Just masts, sail covers and little dark and light shapes. I painted the reflections fairly early on in the process and it’s a good thing I did since the wind picked up not long after and changed the scene considerably. The last thing I did was the masts, trying to connect them with the sails, and not always succeeding.

Lake water

Here’s a tip for watercolour painters: bring extra water if you go out painting. I should really carry a jug in the car but I don’t, so today when I needed some clean water I took the stairs down to the lake and filled my cup. Now this wasn’t for drinking — the water from Lac St. Louis isn’t clean enough for that. But if you don’t mind little bits of seaweed floating around, it’s fine for painting. The yacht club in Pointe Claire is starting to have that busy summer feeling and that’s what I tried to convey today. The water was dead calm so it was a good day to paint, although probably not a good day for sailing. Painted on Arches paper, 140 lb CP, 15″ x 11″.

Fast and dark

I was sketching some boats in the bay today when the storm came up, fast and dark behind me. I turned the car around to face the lake and caught the view out of my side window since the rain was coming down too quickly to see through the front windshield. Sometimes you just have to adapt. The boats will be for another day.

Win a free 7-part video lesson on “Sketching Landscapes in Pen, Ink and Watercolor”

Just in time for summer sketching season, I’m excited to announce my first online video class in conjunction with the website Craftsy.com. “Sketching Landscapes in Pen, Ink and Watercolor” will be out in a couple of weeks but in the meantime I’m giving away my new class for FREE to one lucky winner who will be announced when the class launches. Click here to enter: http://www.craftsy.com/ext/ShariBlaukopf_Giveaway

The class covers so many techniques that I talk about daily on my blog. We start with a look through my sketchbooks, and then we go outdoors to the Flatirons in Boulder, Colorado to work on composition and value sketches. Back in studio we look at different ways of painting skies, and then move through all the stages of the sketch — from drawing with pen and ink to painting the big shapes and then adding texture and darks. The final lesson is about making your sketch unique and using a limited palette to evoke mood. I’ve often been asked if I have any instructional videos, so it’s exciting to finally be able to share this.
When the class launches I’ll post it here, but in the meantime good luck in the draw!

Cascades

There’s a group of plein air painters that meets every Tuesday in the summer at different scenic spots around Montreal. They’ve been doing this for over 20 years and I hope to join them as often as I can this summer. Today’s meeting spot was Parc des Ancres at Pointe des Cascades in Vaudreuil— literally a park filled with over 100 old anchors and maritime artifacts from the abandoned Soulanges Canal. I was in the mood to paint water so I found a good viewing spot and tackled the derelict lock and the water seeping through it. I don’t think I’ve ever painted falling water so this was lots of fun. These outings are open to all so if you are interested in dates and locations send me an email and I’ll send you the list. Painted on a quarter sheet of Arches paper.