Journaling With Calligraphers! June 6-7

Oh my! Where did this last month go!?!
A week of it was spent on vacation in Idaho with my brother (that's him at right). In addition to swinging in a hammock, helping prepare for a family party and larking about in the Owyhee Mts looking for fossils (in the craggy area above left), and lots of other good times, that journey included a 1065 mile road trip. Ouch!

Much of the rest of the month was consumed in an illustration job I'm doing on some interpretive signs showing a coho salmon stream, complete with coho, rocks, eggs, crayfish, assorted snails and other stuff. Plus a cottonwood tree and sedges on the bank. Ayeee!

And then, there is the online watercolor pencil class I'm taking with Kate Johnson with it's multiplicity of assignments (for those classmates who wanted to see the roadside flowers I sketched this Dirty Socks flower from, go to the end of this blog entry) and the 4th of July weekend (I went with Daniel and his mother up into the Siskiyou Mountains yesterday to admire the wildflowers, which are in their prime up high where it's cooler {it was 99° down here in the valley yesterday, and 100+ this last week!}). There wasn't much time to sketch, but I was wishing, wishing! I mean, look at that incredible flowered mountain meadow at left!

Oh, and I forgot to mention the consultation job I'm doing with the Oregon Trail Institute on a proposed publication. Additionally, I'm preparing a brand new workshop which debuts tomorrow at the North Mountain Park Nature Center, teaching Nature Observation and Journaling to kids ~ 12 in all. Of course, you never want to let on to participants that they're taking an untried workshop, so I shall have to appear as though I know what I'm doing....

So, I hope you delightful calligraphers who took my class on June 6 will forgive the lateness of this blog about our riotous and delicious class. I've been trying to get at it for quite some time!

Cynthia, from the local Calligraphers Guild contacted me to ask if I would teach a journaling class for the members. I was a little nervous about teaching calligraphers because, well, they can callig a whole lot better than I can ;^} and I thought they might be, well, you know, snooty about it. But Cynthia was SO nice via email, I decided I must be wrong ~ and was I ever! I don't think I've ever laughed as much in any other class I've taught.

Some students brought hand-made journals to work in, and by the end of the class had made quite a lot of headway in them. The cover of the one above is made of wire "hardware cloth" interwoven with textile strips, ribbon and yarn, a gorgeous thing.

Because the participants were already well acquainted, it was an uproarious class, full of jokes and laughter and experimentation, and the results were remarkable.

Although their calligraphy skills were well developed, and some had art skills and training, others were nevertheless beginners at art and not experienced with journaling. So I went ahead with the usual agenda, starting with the contour drawings of hands, then sketching a leaf, then drawing sea shells.

The next step was designing attractive pages using the freeform shapes I brought to class, and writing descriptive paragraphs about their shells. Things progressed quickly from there with the introduction of the "Fun Font" for adding titles, then we stopped for a break and critique, a cuppa tea or coffee, and ruminations about their progress.

I think because they are calligraphers, they are used to working with art tools, which gave them a distinct edge over the average beginning artist. I passed out the watercolor pencils to add color, and soon they were coloring their shells with great relish, while I trotted around the group offering suggestions, praise, and advice about problem areas.

[Did I mention that when I arrived at our workshop in the local library meeting room I was greeted with my very own calligraphy name tag? THAT's a first ~ I'm usually the one handing out name tags!]

Beginning artists worked slowly and cautiously, while more experienced ones sailed ahead enthusiastically, adding color to their hand and leaf contour excercises. I was delighted to watch their experiments in mixing colors and trying out watercolor pencil techniques.

By the end of the day, they had turned out some beautiful journal pages. Not all were totally finished, but that's the beauty of journaling ~ one can always add to or finish things later, but in the meantime, they still look nice. Here are the first day's results:
















DAY 2
At the end of the first day, I had asked them to bring ephemera to glue into their journals the next day. Few people manage to remember this the second day, so I was gobsmacked when they brought in BOXES of ephemera. It seems that calligraphers like to play around with stuff like this, and they even scrounge around at yard sales to find goodies. I had brought leaves pressed in my little microwave plant press, so our table was a veritable cornucopia of ephemera! They also brought art books and journals and other delights and examples to share. I didn't get a chance to look at everything, alas!

Our lone male student had assigned himself the homework of producing his own Fun Font, and he displayed it with quite understandable pride. I finally managed to get this unruly bunch seated for the writing session, and soon they were hard at work crafting creative paragraphs and haiku, sketching new subjects with great skill, and studying the placement of various bits of ephemera on their pages.

After lunch I introduced decorative borders and initial caps, so the afternoon was a riot of sketching, writing, snipping, gluing, flower-pressing and creating imaginative borders around pages and between elements on the pages.

I think I probably learned nearly as much as they did in this class. My usual classes lean more toward hesitant beginners, so watching these folks at work was quite entertaining. (Don't get me wrong -- I LOVE teaching beginners, helping them open doors they didn't even know had doorknobs on 'em. But this was fun, too.)

In order to keep from interrupting their trains of thought, I tried to keep myself busy doing their assignment along with them (sort of) with examples of borders, shaped creative paragraph, ephemera, labels, haiku, Fun Font and color. The only thing lacking, since I was trying to squeeze so much on the page, is any sort of sophisticated "design." But it's a fun page to look at, and it was GREAT fun to make.

The students shared their paragraphs and haiku with the class, to everyone's delight, and we had a couple of critiques during the afternoon. Since some students were moving pretty fast, a few extra journal pages were created, one on black paper:


I left the afternoon journal page subjects wide open, and some interesting things popped out. There was even gold-leafing (this was done by one of the students, who, at the end of the day, demonstrated for us how to apply the tissue-thin gold)!

Here are some of the products of Day 2. I muffed Kathy's the photo of page -- it came out so blurry I couldn't use it. You can see it in progress here at right. I'm sorry Kathy ~ it was a lovely page, with ferns, pressed plants, and a really excellent creative paragraph.



So here are the second day's masterpieces, minus Kathy's:
















Cool, huh? My thanks to the Calligraphers Guild students who made this such a fun class!

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And here, as promised to Kate Johnson's online watercolor pencil students, is the wild rock garden south of Bend, Oregon, and the sketch and photo I made there. The mosquitoes were siphoning off my blood as I sketched, so I only got some of the flower heads in before I caved and ran for the car, but I sketched more from the screen of my digital camera the next day. I didn't add them all, as you can see, as the number can be variable and I needed to finish the drawing for class.

Masking Demo, watercolor pencil

Here's a quick masking demo I used to keep grass blades white so I could paint swirly ripple patterns around underneath, then remove the mask and paint the leaves. The end result wasn't perfect, but it's passable and with more practice it gets better. This was using my own resource photo, with a frog inserted from another photo I had taken.

Without the mask, I would have had to 1) try to paint the leaves opaquely on top of the ripples, which is very difficult since light over dark in watercolor pencils is usually less than satisfactory for fine details, or 2) try to stop and go with the painted swirls, leaving the grass blades white so I could paint them later. This is not a very good solution since it interrupts the swirl with unfortunate effects, destroying the smooth stroke. Remember to click for a larger image (and so you can read the instructions).

So here are the steps I took:











































































And finally, the end result.

Watercolor Pencil Demos ~ Kate's Spring Class

I should be blogging the last workshop I had -- it was a hummer and I WILL get to it. But first I need to put up a demo I promised to my classmates in Kate Johnson's Watercolor Pencil Class of a painting I did: "Daniel by Firelight" (see at left). This has to be fast, so mostly the words are on the pictures.

So, here they are. Click on the picture for a bigger image.













I'm starting to work in the upper left corner since I am right-handed. By starting there and working toward the lower right as much as possible, I can avoid smearing or mussing my work. Where I must put my hand on a finished area, I tape a piece of clean paper over the finished part. If you use a piece of loose paper, the PAPER can smear the work, so tape it down.























To clarify #4, the white crayon layer was wet, then dried with a hair dryer before intensifying it with the pencil.
















































The photos were used only for inspiration. The final result did not look like either photo.












Cleaning the brush on Daniel's jacket made the perfect semi-transparent stroke needed for the barely visible cloth.













It was tempting to color yellow or orange into the white because everyone knows "flames aren't white, they're orange" but I mostly resisted.













The paper is taped right over where the face would be. It doesn't look like it in the picture here.













Always let a picture "rest" as long as possible before saying it's done. When you come back to it after a pause, you can see areas that need improvement.


































And the final result, with the edges trimmed in Photoshop and globally corrected for color to make it as close as possible to the original, but no other computer improvements. Daniel likes it a lot.

Nature Sketch-Journaling, May 9-10, 2009

A new venue! The Jefferson Nature Center on Bear Creek just south of Medford, Oregon, is a lovely place for a workshop. On the weekend of May 9th, it was warm and sunny, the air was scented with lilacs and other spring flowers, and we had a wonderful time. As one of the students said on the second day: "This is a great Play-Day!" And it was.

DAY 1
First, I showed them how I outfit myself to go out and sketch ~ that's a picture of me unloading my sling bag. It carries my Robert Bateman sketchbook (6x9), a sitting pad, my specs, a fistful of watercolor pencils and a sharpener, mechanical pencil, kneaded eraser, ballpoint pen, my waterbrush and a wipe rag, magnifying glass, snack, and a bunch of other things as well. It's always fun to unload it for a class, as things keep coming and keep coming, like from a magician's hat. I really should put a couple of colored scarfs in there for a finale!

We started out with the right-brain warm-ups, as usual, the students producing some great "blind" contour drawings of their hands as a beginning. Contour drawings always look best with all the wrinkles, hangnails and gnarly stuff included. The results are always fun. There's no way to be critical of a drawing you did without even looking!

After that, drawing the curled oak leaf was easy, and every drawing was excellent. The women in this group are definitely candidates for my intermediate drawing class.

With no further ado, they graduated to drawing seashells, planning their drawings as journal pages, leaving space for text, title, interesting dividers and other items to be added later. They practiced some "fun font" lettering to use for titles, and soon their journal pages began to emerge.

On the first day of my journaling classes we concentrate on drawing, and on the second day we put our minds to creative writing, poetry and haiku. But I like to see what they can do on their own that first day. I was quite impressed with the output from this bunch. [Remember, you can click on any of these images to see a larger version.] Here's Tiffany's initial journaling page. Notice the bull kelp seaweed she used to set off the text from the drawing.

Usually the students stick to the assignments, but sometimes I get one who wants to go off on her own tack. Maya drew an excellent shell, then took off on a tangent to journal an imaginative lighthouse. She worked faster than the others but used her time inventively to decorate the opening pages of her journal with a Celtic knot and other imagery. I think the other students found it inspiring to watch her fearless efforts.

Since I had added a couple of ideas to this class plan, I decided to offer the students the opportunity to add some watercolor pencil color to their journal pages on this first day instead of waiting till the second day. It was an inspired idea! Simone is at work here, adding color to her shell (see above). All the journals sparkled with color in short order. Here's the first day's colored entries:







The two that have "torn" edges were actually cut with "torn edge" scissors, which give a much better control of where the edge ends up. Since Simone and Tiffany were working on single sheets instead of in journals, they cut their pages out to mount in their journals later.

DAY 2
On the second day, my students produced some VERY evocative creative writing, haikus and poetry. In order to not bother my students as they work on meaningful word combinations, I write in my journal, too. While they were making 4-liner poems, I did this one (which, fortunately, wasn't taken too seriously):
"My workshop students stare, intent,
Focused on their page.
If they don't write a poem right now,
I shall get enraged."

Having fun with the watercolor pencils, they did creative things with their poety and colorful borders. Then I brought out the Microfleur press (a microwave plant press), and we all went outside to select wildflowers (and tame flowers, too), grasses and leaves to press and add to our pages as ephemera. Journals can really brighten up with pressed foliage and flowers, especially when the leaves are colorful in the fall.
Here Maya loads up all kinds of small florets to decorate her page, and taking turns, everyone got a chance to try out this innovative "instant plant press" (we were mostly using 2 or 3 thirty-second nukes for each group of flowers/leaves).

We broke for lunch after an intense morning of play, enjoying the warm sunshine (perfect temperature!) at the picnic table in the Nature Center yard... then back to work arranging dried flowers, titles, haiku, poetry, writing, and colorful dividers on the pages. Students read their haiku and poems out loud, as well.

Occasionally I would shoo everyone out of their seats to go around and look at what the others were doing. In my journaling classes I encourage people to share and copy ideas from each other. If someone does something cool, it's okay for the others to try something similar out on their own page/s.



The day ended too soon for all of us, although workshops are generally so energy intensive that I'm exhausted at the end of the day. Maya's Dad took this picture of us out the side door of the Nature Center under the wisteria (did you know wisteria smells like jasmine tea?) at the end of the workshop.

Great day, great place to work, great people, great fun.

Wildlife Sketching Basics Workshop 5/2-3/09

Oops, missed my deadline... I'd hoped to blog the Wildlife Sketching Workshop before I held last weekend's Journaling workshop, but there's too much happening. F'rinstance, I'm sitting here at my computer damp and steamy from planting my little garden in a light misting drizzle. The poor little plants were getting wimpy sitting on the kitchen counter, and a rainy day is perfect to plant....so the blogging is just now beginning while I am trying to keep warm-though-moist.

On the other hand, hopefully, I have set out my cherry, grape and yellow tomatoes before they wilted ENTIRELY away, planted basil and cilantro, salad nasturtiums and a stevia (the "sweet" plant), and tried to get my sprinkler system going. Since it's raining, it's hard to tell if I got it right, though. It's a paltry garden this year. I have been too busy to poke my nose out the door (see last week's entry. And I'm working on a new project now, too.). That's the garden, big tree pots plunked down on my steep wooded hillside with a deer fence around it to keep out the wild turkeys and deer.

At any rate, about the Wildlife Sketching Basics workshop. I taught a similar class (Raptor Sketching) a couple of years ago for the Siskiyou Field Institute, and although the evaluations from the students were good, I wasn't satisfied. I didn't have time to teach them the basics of drawing properly before they were confronted by those imposing birds.

This time I had a full day to prepare them -- and it STILL wasn't enough. I'll show you how it went, then tell you how I think I'll fix it if SFI wants to try again next year.

On Day 1 I did a version of my basic drawing class, but with the sketching exercises oriented to things they might be sketching.

The first thing to do when sketching a living, moving thing is to study it quietly before beginning to sketch. I was actually very pleased with the way they were able to begin to see how to translate what they were viewing onto the paper. Here's one of the first exercises. They only had fifteen minutes to work on this, and they applied themselves to it vigorously. (And no, we didn't draw any frogs the second day!)

Next, I showed them a number of textures which they would find useful for not only wildlife feathers and fur, but many other subjects as well.

One particular goal is to avoid a lot of erasing, which slows you down considerably, and also can frighten away your subject. So, believe it or not, I taught them to sketch with ballpoint pens. The fascinating thing about that is that after the first fright about working in ink, the students quickly become attracted to the way you can get tonal variety and quality from an ordinary ballpoint, and the fact that since you know you will be drawing without erasing, you observe much more carefully and accurately.

Above is the texture exercise, which we did in both pencil and ballpoint with almost identical results. It was an epiphany for several of the students. I think I may have produced a couple more ballpoint converts with this class.

We quit at 2:30, all of us pretty worn out with the intense effort. This workshop was held at the Deer Creek Nature Center near Selma, Oregon, and although it was threatening to rain, I went for a walk along the creek to get some research photos for a trail signage project I'm working on for them. This is the Center, looking east. If you turn around toward the west, you see the huge old trees along the creek, and the mountain rising behind it. The side of that mountain is a tilted, boggy fen, covered with cobra lilies (Darlingtonia) which eat unwary insects. We sketched those in a workshop last September.

I couldn't cross the creek to see them since the water was pretty high, but the creek banks were beautiful, covered in mosses and populated by a gorgeous endemic plant found only a few places in the world. I forgot what I was told it is, but it grows in the water, standing more than two feet tall, and has candy pink pompoms of flowers at the top of thick, hairy stems. Any ideas?

Across the hillside, in dry serpentine soil, Indian paintbrushes of orange, red, and nearly yellow, dotted the stony earth. This is a fascinating environment. But it started to rain, and it poured all night (much to my dismay, thinking of our wildlife sketching scheduled for the next day). The rain made quite a racket on the canvas roof of the Center's yurt, in which three of us were sleeping.

Day 2. With all that deluge, I didn't have high hopes for the next day, but when you're doing a workshop you have to take what comes, rain or shine. We had prepared as much as we could for the possibility of rain, and when we met at Wildlife Images, Cyndee brought an owl, a bald eagle, and a Harlan's hawk (a variety of redtailed hawk) into the nice dry classroom for us to sketch for the morning. I think the students did remarkably well for a first try. Pat's sketch of the Harlan's hawk, here, is really nice.

After our break for lunch, it wasn't raining so we went out to try to sketch cougar, bears and wolves. The grizzly bear fascinated us by clutching a sappy tree and gnawing on it (see the picture) but it all happened too quickly to draw.

The students tried valiantly to sketch, but the animals were NOT pleased with the soggy day and weren't terribly cooperative. And I think the students were a bit overwhelmed, by then. Still, Richard turned out a nice cougar drawing, particularly considering that he had to look through heavy wire fence to see it.

At 2:30, getting sprinkled on and done in, the group headed back to the classroom for close-ups of Nubs the Badger. Nubs is a hoot, reminding me a bit of a furry, low-built tank. I got some quick sketches of him (see below), but without previous experience in sketching moving things, the students weren't able to catch much of this wiggly character. I encouraged the students to take lots of digital photos to work from later, so this turned out to be more a photo session than a sketching exercise.

So here's my thinking on this workshop. While the students gave the course a general thumbs-up, and did learn a lot about drawing, they also suggested that a half-day of wildlife sketching would be plenty. The brain wears out after so much input.

They also suggested that it might be helpful to spend the morning drawing from photos of the animals they would be sketching, just to get features and shapes firmly fixed in their minds and form mental templates of each animal. Then they could draw from the live animals in the afternoon. We had done a bit of hawk template drawing the previous day, but they would like even more.

I'm also thinking that we tried to cover too much ~ and that birds alone would be plenty to challenge the students. That would also mean that we wouldn't have to depend on good weather for the class since we draw the raptors in the classroom. We could hold that workshop any time of the year instead of having to wait for warm outdoor sketching weather. Excellent!

So next time, the class will be called "Raptor Sketching Basics," and I think everyone will be pleased as punch. Me too. I can hardly wait to try again.

Watercolor Pencil/Computer Interpretive Sign

Sometimes I do illustration jobs, and at the moment I have two in the hopper, both interpretive signage for nature trails. I just finished a really interesting one which took a great deal of time ~ a section of Jeffrey pine trunk with three lichens on it. It was the third in a series, the first two being a distant view of the entire tree and a composite of bark, branch/needles, and cone.

In case you've never met a Jeffrey, it's a western pine similar to the prickly ponderosa pine, but the cones generally won't make holes in you if you play catch with them. DON'T try catching a tossed ponderosa cone!

The trunk of both is very similar: reddish, with a bark composed of layered jigsaw-shaped pieces. The bark has a sweet scent. Some say it smells like pineapple, others say it's a vanilla odor. I smelled one once and couldn't quite place the scent ~ but it was very pleasant.

At any rate, it took ages to work around all the jigsaw pieces then color them appropriately. I had a good photograph provided by the people who wanted the sign, and in order to meet the deadline I followed the shapes of the bark pieces closely (after some judicious artistic rearrangement) using my Wacom tablet and a stylus. To envision and create the shapes from scratch would have taken forever. Click on an image to see a larger version.

The first image (above) is the first run at the flaky bark, the original photo I was working from, the selection of watercolor pencils I chose to color it, and my waterbrush with the water in the barrel. My drawing is on the left and that's the photo on the right.

When I had the outline finished, I printed out the b/w image to paint. I needed to work large since it's a large sign, so I separated the original illustration into two sections and printed them on two sheets of heavy, slightly toothed paper that I knew would take the moisture required by the watercolor pencils.

I was working out on the deck to enjoy the warm spring sunshine, so I taped a plastic dish to my masonite drawing board to hold the pencils so they wouldn't slide when I tilted the board on my lap. In the second image, with the photo on the left, I've started applying the color to the b/w image on the right. It looks a bit faded in the bright sunshine. I'm leaving unpainted the areas where the lichens will go.

The third image (above) shows the drawing taking shape and color. The photo is still on the left here, and while I'm using the reference fairly closely, I am taking some artistic license with the color and details.

In the next image you can see all the parts and pieces. The two-part illustration is on the left. The lichen illustrations will be layered into place after I blend the two parts together in Photoshop.

There is a slight overlap of the two bark sections, but since they're hand-painted, the two aren't exactly the same. The solution to join them seamlessly is to layer them into perfect place then use the eraser on 1% to remove the top layer until they blend. It works amazingly well, the joining being invisible when finished.

The photo is on the right in this composite. Down at lower left is a printout of my original drawing, showing a red outline where I planned to put the lichens ~ I didn't want to waste time and energy drawing or painting the area behind them.

At this point, I scanned the painted bark illustrations back into Photoshop to blend the two pieces together, add the lichens, and tweak the shading.

And the final image is a detail of the finished illustration. I darkened the fissures between the bark slabs to visually deepen them, using the "burn" tool in Photoshop CS2. I also used the burn tool to darken the right side, to make the bark appear to recede as it goes around the cylinder of the trunk. I also darkened a shadow below each lichen.

I'm pretty happy with this combination of design, handwork, watercolor pencil coloring, and computer blending. It took a long time, but the results were well worthwhile.

The more practice I get with the watercolor pencils and waterbrush, the more I like them. It also gives me a better handle on presenting watercolor pencil painting to my workshop students.

******

BTW, I taught my new Wildlife Sketching class last weekend. It was quite a ride. I'll try to get at that before this next weekend because I have another journaling workshop on the 9th and I'm trying to keep my ducks in a row! Wish me luck!

Brand New Watercolor Pencil Workshop!

Last week's workshop was exciting for me. It was a new, expanded version of the introductions to watercolor pencils which I've been doing as part of the basic and intermediate nature sketching workshops for quite some time.

I'll still continue to introduce watercolor pencils in those classes, but if the students want detailed instruction, they'll be able to attend this new Watercolor Pencil Workshop for LOTS more good stuff.

In the past, the color session has only been a one-day thing, but this workshop extends the color instruction to two days, with time for many new and exciting projects. I took a chance and just barely touched on drawing basics ~ I figured that anyone brave enough to take watercolor pencil instruction would have at least the rudiments of drawing, and I was right (this time!). I had five students, two who listed themselves as beginners and three intermediates. The lovely thing was that they were all returning students who had taken nature journaling or basic sketching with me. Loved that!

One of my projects was to get my students sketching with ballpoint pens. If you are painting with watercolor pencils, an underdrawing done in pencil tends to fuzz and fade, but waterproof ink stays crisp and clear. In my new workbook for the first day, I included a page for them to try pencil, ballpoint, and waterproof fiber-tip ink.

Sketching in ink is pretty intimidating, but they gritted their teeth and bent to the task, finding it surprising rewarding.

The subject was a boringly brown eucalyptus seedpod. The assignment was to try the different underdrawings, then experiment with peculiar, "unnatural" colors to make it look good. The results were fascinating. Here are some photos I took of the process.

This got the students comfortable first with ink drawing, then with mixing colors from opposite sides of the color wheel (with which we started the class) plus thinking out of the box with regard to how to achieve natural colors. It's not intuitive to get brown from purple and yellow, red and green, or blue and orange.

At the same time, I was introducing the students to the many ways to pull color from the pencils: drawing into a wet spot, laying down color with the pencil then wetting it, and lifting color off the end of the pencil with the brush, as shown here.

You'd think a single assignment would elicit similar results, but this class produced the entire spectrum. Here are seedpods from all five students. There is one actual seedpod in the picture. Can you tell which one it is? (click for a bigger image).

We touched on a number of concepts over the course of the two days. One was how to depict a white subject so that it's not blah or just shades of gray. A good way to demonstrate what we actually see (and don't realize) was to place a white object on a brightly colored surface, then look at the color bounced back up onto its underside.

This sea shell set on a chartreuse band of color was definitely greenish underneath, and if you slid it across the bands of color, the effect of the changing colors was even more dramatic.

Here are some of the results the students achieved by shading white subjects with color/s.

I also thought my students would also enjoy learning how to make waterdrops. Susie Short has a wonderful tutorial on her website here. With her very generous permission, I included her page of instructions in my workbook (along with credits and her URL so my students can look up her website at home ~ there are LOTS of neat things there) and we produced some pretty juicy dewdrops, which can really liven up a flower or foliage picture. While it's intended as a watercolor technique, it adapts to watercolor pencils perfectly.

On the second day we were one student short (it was the first gloriously springish day we'd had, and she couldn't resist an invitation to go painting plein air). But the remaining four arrived raring to go. We tried out the dewdrops again, in order to confirm the technique, then got seriously into how to render fur and to realistically color trees, landscapes and foliage.

[BTW, in this shot of my classroom, you can see how I arrange tables for a small class. I can enter between the two tables for close-up one-on-one instruction from directly in front of each student].

We worked on brush technique and quality with my standby orchid project, then got down to business after lunch with our piece de resistance ~ watercolor pencil paintings of gorgeous red and yellow apples.

Each student had a different style and method of working, and it was fun to see how each approached her apple project. Here's an apple in three steps:

Watercolor pencils are notorious for not allowing white highlights to be added after you are finished, so we also experimented with resists, applied before coloring. I felt the "resist masks" used by serious watercolorists (the liquid kind you daub or paint on, then rub off later) seemed a bit daunting for beginning students, although I've used them for years, so we experimented with white china markers with a certain amount of success.

I'd never taught the technique of applying china marker resists before, and I still have some improvement to make on that. I think next time I will have the students do some tests with the china markers and watercolor pencils before applying highlights to their subjects. It's two different things to a) be able to do something proficiently and b) teach someone else the same technique. I learned a lot about teaching resists last weekend!

It never ceases to amaze me that most students will jump right in, applying colors, techniques, or things like the resist without making a test patch off to the side. I really encouraged color-testing this time, and I think the students got more predictable results. Here a student has done some color tests before starting, and is referring to them as she adds green to her apple. Good!

And here are their final apple results. These definitely look good enough to eat, don't you think? The third one from the left is the one underway in the photo above. And actually, those white resist highlights look pretty darned good for a first try!

As always, I ended the class with evaluations. I was delighted with the answer one student gave to the question "What is your favorite medium?" She said "It was pencil... but I'm becoming a convert to ballpoint and also really enjoyed the waterproof fiber-tip pen."

I was also pleased with one response to a question asking them to tell me about their experience of the class: "I loved this class. It was great fun to learn how to use the pencils, waterbrush, china white, etc. I felt more confident after all working together on the same structured project instead of being told to just pick something and paint it without a clue at how to proceed."

This encourages my opinion that people learn best and most confidently when given specific goals to accomplish and specific instructions on how to achieve them. Once you have the technique under your belt, you can go any direction you want with it.

My next workshop is another new one: Sketching Wildlife. It will be May 2-3, starting at the Siskiyou Field Institute's Deer Creek Center (in Selma, OR) with a day mastering sketching techniques for drawing animals ~ fur, feathers, birds and mammals, and moving subjects, etc. The second day will be spent at Wildlife Images Rehab Center, at Merlin, OR, putting that new knowledge to work drawing raptors (hawks, eagles, owls), bears, wolves, foxes, and whatever strikes the students' fancy. This workshop should be a real kick! I've been creating the workbooks for it all month, and finished them last week, ready for printing.

Check it out here. Then come join us. It should be great fun!

Gotta go. There's a Pacific Treefrog pair croaking amorously by the pond outside my studio door, and it's almost 7pm and I'm starving. Ciao!