Nature Sketching Workbooks Are Now Available!

I didn't DREAM it would take this long to get my first two workshop workbooks reshaped into stand-alone books that you could use just like my workshops to learn how to draw and shade things so they look real! No idea!

But I finally have their webpages up and running on my website, and now you can download the first two: Nature Sketching Basics and Nature Sketching Details! Get through these two, you are up and running toward your dreams. And that's the best I can offer since I won't be offering workshops anymore.

WARNING!!! These are NOT actual books that will arrive in the mail ~ they're DOWNLOADS, for which you pay $9.95US with your credit card or PayPal, download, save to your computer hard-drive, open up in Adobe Acrobat, then immediately print out to use. Or you could use them straight from the monitor if you don't have a printer.

The $9.95 is an introductory price only, and will be going up in a couple of weeks to $19.95, so act soon if you want to get this price.

Nature Sketching Basics is the key workbook, and even if you don't plan to get them all, you should probably plan to get this one as a base workbook because it lays the groundwork for all the rest.

That groundwork is important. In my real-time workshops, I would actually repeat the materials in the Basics workbook in every class before I would start on the new stuff, just to warm everyone up and get them "on the same page," but in the stand-alone workbooks you would probably feel gypped if the first quarter of each workbook was identical to every other one, so I lightly skip over the right-brain stuff and refer you back to Nature Sketching Basics (then I use that space in the workbooks to put in extra goodies that I didn't have room for in the real-time workshops).

I am SO DELIGHTED to get these workbooks up and running!

The revision is enormous. In my workshops I am there to introduce the wonderful right-brain process that gets my students off the ground and drawing in lickety-split time. I'm there to show you how to hold your pencil, how to knead an eraser, how to use the arc of your hand in drawing certain shapes. How to transfer what you see into doable pencil marks.

And I can show you how to critique your own work (via a conga line to the nearest restroom, with much giggling and eye-rolling).

I can hover over your shoulder and point to places where line quality is perfect and where it needs more improvement. I can even hold your hand, if you want, to demonstrate the flick needed to bring off a perfect mouse whisker. And I can urge you along with a bit of sympathy or humor (whichever you need) when you hit a plateau.

So to take the place of that (not perfectly, but going a L-O-N-G way) I have added words: instructions and asides, caveats and encouragements, descriptions, insights and suggestions, tutorials and step-by-step demos, and I have scattered my innermost drawing secrets all over the place so that anyone can take advantage of my many years of experience.

There are a lot of illustrations and some projects in these workbooks that weren't in the ones that went with the class. And I had to add the tutorials to walk you through things I was able to quickly show on the blackboard or demonstrate for you before you tried them in the real-time workshops. The mouse, here, for instance.

In fact, every illustration I've included here, plus scads more, are in the new workbooks.

It's been exhausting. I am reamed out. But satisfied.

And I am recuperating, recharging to start the next workbook soon. They're going faster now that I have figured out the new format. But it will never really get speedy ~ after all, they ARE more than 20 pages long each ~ the workbook's webpage alone (plus jumping through the hoops to get it ready to download) takes a day or two to produce!

In my last post, on January 24, I was asking how y'all felt about my putting skulls into the workbook, and the response was unreservedly enthusiastic -- not a single nay-sayer. So they're in, but not in the first two workbooks -- they're in Sketching Wildlife Basics, which is nearly ready, too, and will be ready for downloading soon.

I'm taking an R&R week off. But then, which workbook would YOU like to see after Sketching Wildlife Basics? Your choices are:

• Natural Landscape Sketching Basics
• Nature Sketching with Watercolor Pencil
• Travel and Nature Journaling (both sketching and writing)

...and any other suggestions from you? How about a new topic, like doing pet portraits, or something else I haven't suggested? I'm open (but new stuff won't appear until I've finished with the workshop workbooks I already have started).

If you download and use one of my workbooks, I would really LOVE to hear from you as to how it works for you (good or bad, honest!), whether you would suggest any changes, additions, or deletions; and PLEASE, let me know if you find any booboos. I found one yesterday, just before uploading it to PayLoadz, a misplaced label that would have had you scratching your head (well, you'd have figured it out from the text, but it might have taken a minute).

Three cheers for the new workbooks!
Hip hip hooray!!!!

Nature Sketching Details Workshop ~ 11-22&23-08

There's never enough time! I've been struggling with this problem with every workshop ~ I have so much I want to teach/share, and so little time to do it in.

During all this last autumn's workshops I tinkered lavishly to find the right balance of time vs. content, guaranteed success vs. challenge, plus adjusting other details ~ all while giving the students results they expected and hoped for. The student evaluations at the end of the classes really helped me figure this out (and the students who won the evaluation raffles appreciated the autographed book prizes ;^)

This fall, I had split the Nature Sketching classes into Beginning (Nature Sketching Basics) and Intermediate (Nature Sketching Details) workshops, which gave the students time to concentrate and complete more projects. Starting in January, I will have further split off the watercolor pencil painting section into its own two-day class, in order to allow the students more time to hone their skills and experiment with the medium.

I will also split the Nature Journaling workshop into two 1-day workshops so that people interested only in nature writing OR in nature journaling could come to whichever class appeals to them. The workshops will be held back-to-back on a weekend, so it's easy enough to take them together, as before.

Obviously, this December I am going to be busy working out more exercises for some of the classes, because when I split them up there was necessarily some repetition of the exercises to bring each class up to speed. The students would prefer a fresh exercise instead of repeating a previous one. In terms of learning, it's probably more useful to repeat an excercise several times, but when you pay for a workshop you expect to get all-new revelations, so I'll work to make sure there are no repeats. I really DO listen to my students!

So that's the update on the behind-the-scenes workshop planning. Here's what my most recent batch of eager students went through.

DAY 1
This was my intermediate nature drawing workshop, so I was quite pleased to see some returning Basic students appear Saturday morning, along with new students. And I had all ages, from a very mature twelve to somewhere in the late 60s or 70s. Great people.

The format of this class was to spend the first day on pencil rendering, including ways to get the drawing accurate, shading for three-dimensional effect, and learning special techniques for special situations (realistic eyes, hair direction, and rendering symmetry in such things as seashells and leaves, etc.). Here's the class, warming up with the draw-your-hand exercise before launching into the details.

Notice the way the classroom is set up in an L shape ~ I like to coach from in front of the student if possible. This keeps me from jostling the student (and the adjacent student) because I can come in from the top of their drawing instead of beside, although sometimes I need to go around behind to see the subject from the student's perspective.

When I have more students, I add another table to make a U, which still gives me the inner work area. This is especially nice because no one has their back to me, and students can see the demos better.

For this class I now tried out a new project, and the results were thrilling both to the students and to me. Students who had time, took their project home to perfect, but most of these were finished in the class.










Be sure to click on these to look at them close-up, because we did some really tricky stuff with them.

DAY 2
On the second day, after admiring and critiquing the mushrooms they'd brought back to class, we concentrated on color, trying pencil, ballpoint, and micron pen drawings combined with various watercolor pencil color wheel combinations to get brown. Then they drew bones and experimented with various ways to use color as shading on the (relatively) white bones.

I encouraged them to use unconventional colors for effect, since anything white bounces back colors that surround it, and their results were fascinating. Here's a pony tooth rendered in green and blue, and a beaver jawbone rendered in ochre and purple, and they both came out excellent and very natural-looking (as did the bones by other students).

The next project was my standby orchid ~ this is a useful model for teaching brush techniques for edges, because it emphasizes how to get precise clean edges and also how to get soft, blurred edges which blend off to nothing. It always amazes (and pleases) me how every orchid ends up different, even though each student hears and responds to exactly the same instructions.

Now they had MOSTof the skills they needed to tackle the day's final project, to draw and paint some gourds I'd found in the local farmer's market. There was one remaining technique I showed them about removing color from the pencil tip with the brush to apply to their picture. You can get a nice, intense color this way, and apply it more precisely then you could with the pencil.

I have to say here that my students are really gracious about my taking pictures. I urge them to just keep working as I come by to snap photos (I do turn the flash off for the least intrusion). For the two photos showing how to remove color from the pencil, though, Randye slowed down a little so I could get the pictures.

One technique we used for these gourds was an under-wash to help blend the color values. Varying shades of yellow seemed best for most of these gourds. You can see the wash at right. The students had a choice of doing the original drawing with pencil or ink. I was pleased when some of them chose ballpoint, because we had tried it out earlier in the day.

While drawing in ink would seem impossible for a beginning or even intermediate student, they discovered (as I had hoped)(and MOST counter-intuitively) that drawing in ink is sometimes easier and more freeing than drawing in pencil. Some students not only drew the original gourd in ink, but then went back after coloring it and put in details with a pen, with excellent results ~ particularly for a first-time effort. Here are their gourd paintings. Be sure to click on them to see them close up.






























As I was saying in the beginning of this post, there never seems to be enough time to finish. These gourds, first time watercolor pencil renderings for (I think) all of these students, were completed (or not completed!) in about an hour and a half. Amazing, huh? While the students learned an immense amount, I think with less pressure and more time they would have been able to produce even more satisfying paintings, as well as learning a few more subtleties. I think the two-day watercolor pencil workshops from January onward will be a very pleasing improvement over this one-day experience with color.