After a busy holiday season during which I took care of all the things I had to do, I thought it would be fun in the new year, to do something just because I wanted to. I didn’t have much time for sketching in December and when I don’t get a chance to draw and […]
Category: Sketches
It’s Here! Grab a Copy of “Sketchbook Journeys: Italy”
Ever since I finished my Italy travel journal, I’ve been wanting to publish it as a Blurb book, just like I did with my Ireland sketchbook back in 2011. But it’s been over a year since I put the final brushstroke on that last sketch of Pisa, and this project just kept getting pushed to […]
Fall Harvest Journal Page + Step-by-Step Border
This page from my new nature journal shows a selection of what I collected the other day when I took a walk in the woods near our house. I wanted to see how many “crops” (seeds, nuts, and berries) I could find as fall dwindles down and winter moves in. Ink & watercolor, two-page spread […]
Dogwood Sketch & Time-Lapse Video
I’ve painted quite a few fall leaves in the past couple of weeks, but I was especially struck by the deep, rich colors of these leaves from the Kousa dogwood tree in our yard. It seemed like every possible autumn color was right there in the leaves on this one twig – deep burgundies, rich […]
Nature Sketching
In September 2015, I’ll be teaching a four-day workshop called “Sketchbook Journaling in Nature” at Touchstone Center for Crafts. Touchstone is a residential learning center located in the Appalachian mountains about 60 miles south of Pittsburgh. We’ll be visiting during one of the prettiest times of the year and will have plenty of opportunities to […]
Out & About
One of the homework assignments I give my sketchbook journaling students is to paint a variegated wash on a sketchbook page without any thought as to what they might decide to draw later on the page. Then, after the wash dries, they are to begin their sketches, using the earlier wash as a unifying color […]
Sunflowers!
10″ x 8″, ink & watercolor on 140 lb. watercolor paper I plant a packet of mixed sunflower seeds in my garden every summer. I water them, weed them, and prop them up when a storm blows through. I don’t harvest the seeds to eat or to fill our bird feeders. The birds usually cling […]
Blue Hydrangeas
My hydrangeas barely bloomed at all this year. The winter of 2014 was so harsh that every one of my hydrangea bushes died back, and it took all summer for them to recover and reach any size at all. Two of them began to blossom around the end of August and are now covered with […]
Adapting What You See…It’s Your Artistic Prerogative!
This painting of a Tudor house was one of my reserve paintings during the Mount Lebanon Plein Air event. I sketched it on a sunny day last summer, sitting on my little three-legged stool across the street from it, then finished up a lot of the details back home in my studio. But as you’ll […]
“Uptown Mt. Lebanon”
One more in my Mt. Lebanon series… 10″ x 8″, ink & watercolor on 140 lb. Canson Montval paper This view of “Uptown” shows Mt. Lebanon’s bustling central business district, with shops, traffic, pedestrians, and people sitting at outdoor cafes. As usual, I did my layout first in pencil, then inked the drawing and began […]
