Currently Browsing: Drawing From Life 162 articles
Simple Things to Sketch
There are a lot of simple things around your home to sketch. What you choose will reflect on what you’re interested in. Shapes, colors, values, negative space. Subjects around us keep us practicing for other subjects we’ve yet to meet. Enjoy exploring your home for simple subjects which yield greater understanding of all those skills […]
Mixed Media View of the Backyard: Expanding Your Visual Vocabulary
It’s always a great idea to take a moment and look out the window. Our neighbors at the back of our yard have a lush growth of ferns at this time of the year. I turned the page in my journal and sketched on this pre-painted background—the verso page background was in the same vein […]
Color Chart Fun
The best way to learn your pigments is to put them to real-world tests painting subjects you might actually paint. Your mind has to work out how to adjust color temperature and value on the fly. You get to use up leftover paint that you already had out on your palette. Creating a color range […]
Guest Artist in My Journal
I had week off from blogging last week while I tried to balance physical therapy and reactions to various events, personal and national. In the latter category I was touched by the very sad death of Rob and Michelle Reiner. If you make a list of my favorite 30 films of all time almost all […]
August Flowers
Even if you aren’t a landscape painter sometimes it’s great to simply look out the window and see the light and shadows. (Strathmore 500 series mixed media journal (7.75 x 9.75 inches); Sakura Pigma Professional Brush Pen, and Schmincke Horadam Factory Pan Watercolors.) What’s outside your window? Take your sketchbook and look now.
James Gurney’s Book on Sketching: Revised and Available February 25!
Fantastic news. I just found out “The Artist’s Guide to Sketching” by James Gurney and Thomas Kinkade is being published in an expanded and remastered edition. It’s the book I’ve been recommending to my students since I found the original in the early 1990s. I’m so excited about this book release I had to post. […]
Trying Out Dagger Brushes (Part Two of I haven’t a Clue How Many Posts)
Now and then I get a desire to test something new. Sometimes I hear about a new product, or a friend mentions something to me. Sometimes I go to the store and see something and wonder what it would be like to use that tool or medium. Other times, like recently, I unpack brushes that […]
What I Did in the Pandemic: Pepper Sketches Of Course!
I’ve been trying to get my digital files organized, and I came across this post from 2020 during the pandemic. I don’t know why I had this large landscape book, and Akademie Watercolor Journal from Hahnemühle. This is their student line of paper. The book is nicely bound, the paper is OK, but […]
Snow Piles, We’ve Seen the Last of Them, for Now
Sometimes projects sneak up on us. Sometimes projects are simply the manifestation of a habit. Sometimes it’s fun to catch up on scanning your journal pages and seeing the massive amounts of snow you’ve just dealt with. (Actually I wasn’t doing much dealing with it—Dick was the one creating 7-foot tall snow piles on either […]
In Context—Use Every Moment to Sketch
In December there were a lot of appointments and a good deal of rushing about. And I’d decided to fill a Strathmore 500 Series Mixed Media Soft covered journal (7.75 x 9.75 inch) in about 10 days. Of course. So it was important to use every moment to sketch. You can read about this moment […]