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!!!!

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!