A new online course: Sketching Spring Flowers

Posted: April 3, 2024 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , | 5 Comments

I know I haven’t been posting much on my blog lately. I always miss that. But I have a good excuse. I’ve been painting lots of spring flowers, and after being so inspired by all the tulips at Cheekwood Gardens in Nashville, I decided to turn all that intensive flower painting into a new online course: Sketching Spring Flowers.

If you’re a long-time reader of this blog, you know that I love to paint spring flowers in my garden. I once even filled an accordion sketchbook with drawings from my garden after I planted 200 bulbs from Costco. This year, alas, I have no spring flowers in my garden, or none that I know of, because we moved house in November, well after planting season. But my former garden, and the one in Nashville, were the inspiration for this course. And I’m hopeful that next year I will have spring flowers in my own backyard again.

Here are a few of the watercolours we draw and paint in the new class: hyacinths in my window, crocuses as they open in the sun, and a wide swath of tulips blowing in the wind. And here’s a link to the course. Have a look! And as always, the course is on sale for $30 USD or $42 CAN for the first week and goes back up to the regular price of $35 USD or $47 CAN after April 9, 2024.

Sabino Canyon walk and draw

Posted: February 12, 2024 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , | 35 Comments

On a day off between workshops in Tucson, we took a drive to see the popular Sabino Canyon. There’s a shuttle you can take to the top, and since we had no idea how difficult the climb would be, we took it. In hindsight, we could easily have walked it since it’s a paved road all the way up. But we did walk down, and I stopped to draw (in ink) along the way.

During my short drawing stops, I tried to capture the distinct characteristics of the landscape — the steep cliffs, the Saguaros clinging to the hills, the winding stream and rocks — as well as a few features of the park such as the stone bridges and the Sabino dam. Each of these scribbles took no more than 5 minutes.

Back at the ranch I added colour to my sketches, as well as a few notes about each location, including one about a place where, from my spot on the shuttle, I caught sight of another sketcher. I was hoping to run into him again on the walk down but he was gone by the time we arrived there. I drew his view anyway.