Classes

You have choices about how to take this class!

Skillshare is a Netflix-style platform where you can take all the classes you want for a monthly membership. This link gives you a free trial to take the class on Skillshare.

On Udemy, you only sign up for the classes you want to take. I’ve bundled this class with two others: Painting the Farmer’s Market and Mixed Media Still Life. You’ll get three different approaches to drawing and painting “found” still lifes, all in one class. Go here to join the class on Udemy.

If you like to sketch from life, you probably draw street scenes, landscapes, people, and architecture—but do you ever stumble across a still life in real life?

In this class, we’ll explore the idea of drawing the still life subjects you encounter in real life, using a tabletop scene in a café as our inspiration.

We’ll take an unusual approach to this subject: We’re going to draw the entire scene with just one line, never lifting our pen from the paper. This is a wonderful exercise for beginning artists, and for more advanced artists, it’s a great way to shake up your style and think creatively about what you’re drawing.

Best of all, we’ll do it with the simplest and most portable of art supplies: a single drawing pen and a portable watercolor kit.

A still life composition might look simple, but there’s a lot to learn! We’ll focus on how to make the most of:

• Interesting linework
• Vivid colors
• Dynamic compositions
• Strong contrast between shapes, colors, and values

By the end of the class, I hope you’ll appreciate how rewarding it can be to add still life to your art practice to help tell the story of your everyday environment and the world around you.

Join this class on Skillshare, which is an online learning platform where you get a monthly subscription to take as many classes as you like. This link gives you a free trial.

On Udemy, you only sign up for the classes you want to take. I’ve bundled this class with two others: Real Life Still Life and Mixed Media Still Life. You’ll get three different approaches to drawing and painting “found” still lifes, all in one class. Go here to join the class on Udemy.

A farmers’ market or a produce stand is an irresistible subject for an artist, with the variety of colors and shapes in all the fruits, vegetables, and flowers. It’s a great chance to experiment and make a lively, colorful sketch.

In this class, we’re going to do a little produce stand in a French village, and we’re going to do it in s bold, graphic style that uses a lot of wonderful ink lines in addition to all that color.

You’ll learn how to use a dip pen and India ink, but you can also take this class using fountain pens, or regular inexpensive drawing pens—your choice!

We’ll work on capturing the different shapes and details without fussing over them, and we’ll make sure that our drawings have a sense of depth and feel realistic.

By the end of this class, you’ll be ready to head out to the farmer’s market and do your own colorful, lively sketches of the season’s bounty.

You have two options for taking this class:

Take it on Skillshare, which is a Netflix-style membership site where you can take all the classes you want for your monthly membership. I have lots of classes on Skillshare, so this is a great deal! This link gives you a free trial. 

Or you can take it on Udemy, where you only sign up for the classes you want to take. On Udemy, I have bundled this class with my class on painting chickens so you’ll have lots of extra examples to learn from! Go here to take it on Udemy.

This class is dedicated to making lively, expressive, personality-filled animal portraits—whether it’s your own pets, that goat you met at the county fair, or your favorite wild animal.

Here’s what you’ll learn:

• How to use either watercolor or gouache, along with mixed-media supplies like colored pencil and markers, to create portraits in your own style.
• How to use measurements, grids, and negative space to get the drawing right.
• How to make a “color map” with colored pencil to establish a base layer of color and value—and to get over the fear of the blank page!
• Different approaches to starting a portrait, by either building up dark tones first or beginning with light washes.
• Finishing touches and texture with our mixed media supplies.
• I’ll provide photos for you to work from, but I also encourage you to round up your own pictures of your pets or your favorite animals.

This is a really fun, whimsical approach to making a portrait in your own style. Once you see the technique, you’ll be able to paint all your favorite animals, and make portraits to hang on the wall or give as gifts.

Paint skies with me! You have two options for taking this class:

Skillshare is a Netflix-style platform for classes where you sign up for a monthly subscription and take all the classes you want. On Skillshare, I’ve divided this class into two parts. The first part is Five-Minute Watercolor Skies, and the second part is Vivid & Colorful Skies in Gouache & Ink . These links will give you a free trial to check out everything Skillshare has to offer.

On Udemy, you just sign up for the individual class you want to take. Go here to take this class on Udemy.

In this class, we’re going to explore two different approaches for capturing skies in a way that’s fresh, lively, and colorful.

First, we’ll use watercolor to do five-minute, wet-into-wet skies. The idea with these skies is to do them very quickly, onsite.  These are going to be loose and quite abstract. They might be inspired by what you see in front of you, but they’re not meant to be a perfect copy. After all, you have a camera for that.

This is a method you can use when you’re sitting on a terrace with your friends, having dinner on a rooftop, and you just want to capture the light and colors in the sky before the sun goes down. It’s perfect for travel sketching and urban sketching.

And then, once they’re dry, we’ll add some details from the landscape with ink or watercolor to help give a sense of scale and place.

And if you really only paint in gouache, you can do this class in gouache as well. Just water it down a little and pretend it’s watercolor. You can get a lot of these same effects.

In the second part of the class, we’re going to take a little more time to paint really vivid, bold skies in gouache.

I’ll show you how to treat gouache kind of like watercolor to get light washes for clear skies, and also as backgrounds for something like a sunset.

Then we’ll do some dramatic daytime and sunset skies, and work on blending and shading to get convincing cloud shapes that still reflect your own style.

I’ll also show you how to use watercolor like gouache, by mixing tube watercolors with white gouache. So this is a great trick for watercolor painters who haven’t quite made the leap into gouache yet, because you’ll only need that one tube of white gouache.

Also, if you happen to have a color you really love in watercolor, but you don’t have that color in gouache, well guess what? You can just mix a little white gouache into it and bring it right into your painting.

Whether you’re primarily painting in watercolor or gouache, and whether you’re usually drawing from life in a travel sketchbook or working in your studio from photographs, these loose, colorful approaches to skies will add life to your urban sketches, cityscapes, and landscapes.

Hi folks! You can take this class on Skillshare, which is a membership-style platform like Netflix where you can take all the classes you want for one low monthly fee. This link will give you a free trial to the first part of the course, Travel Sketching Interiors in One-Point Perspective.    Here is a link to the second part of the course, Sketching Interiors in Two Point Perspective.

Or you can take both classes combined on Udemy, where you only sign up for the classes you want to take. See it on Udemy here.

Here’s a bit more about the course:

When we’re doing travel sketching or urban sketching, sometimes we forget about interiors. But when you travel, or even when you’re out and about in your own hometown, you’re inside all kinds of interesting spaces. That could be your house, or the apartment or hotel you stay in when you travel, or maybe it’s an art museum, a cathedral, or the café where you have your morning coffee.

All of these are places you can capture in your sketchbook to just help evoke a sense of place and remind you of little moments in your everyday life or your vacation.

The trick with interiors is that you need to really understand perspective. So in this class, we’re going to work on simple one and two-point perspective, which will help us build the room and place all the furniture within it. You might be used to doing this outdoors, on the street, but we’ll work on applying those techniques indoors as well.

Once we work out how perspective works inside a room, we’ll get really creative and playful with ink, watercolor, markers, colored pencil, and any other mixed media you’d like to use.

Although we’re going to be working from photos in this class, the idea is that we’ll create quick, simple sketches that you can absolutely do on location.