How to paint a sunrise landscape with a waterbrush.

I love painting with waterbrushes. They are now the only brushes I use, even in the studio. They easily create graded washes (an application of paint that transitions from more intense pigment to a pale tint) which I find everywhere in nature. As you paint, the pigment in the brush gets used up but the

How to draw a Forest (video)

Learn how to draw distant evergreen forests and the view from within the woods. Here we explore layering values (from light to dark) and intentionally controlling the values and detail of each layer.

Watercolor Trees with a Flatbrush (video)

Learn how to paint trees in watercolor with a Kuretake Fude Water Brush Pen, Flat Type, 2 Heads (KG205-70). The brush is great for field sketching. It gives a range of effects that suggest foliage. Also learn how to draw tree trunks so that they appear to advance, recede, or bend.

Sierra Sunset Landscapeito

There you are in the High Sierra. The sun has set over a nearby ridge and the light is beginning to fail. As you put on your hat and extra layers to prepare for the night, you look to the east and see the “Belt of Venus”. The blue line, low across the sky made

5 Minute Landscape: Watercolor Pencil

Watercolor pencils are great tools for fast sketching. Start just like a pencil sketch and then add a little bit of water to blend some of the strokes. Three big tricks to help Keep it small. Thumbnail sketches can be just as satisfying as big landscapes and they take less time. Just use one color

5 Minute Landscape: Graphite

A soft (2B) graphite pencil and a blending tool are great fast sketching media. The trick is use the blender not just as a tool to smooth pencil strokes but as a drawing tool itself. Once you get graphite on the tip of the blender you can use it like a paintbrush to add value into

The Five Minute Landscape (video workshop)

In this workshop we explore landscape drawing for the artist on the run- how to draw and paint a landscape in five minutes or less, while standing up, in wet weather. Learn how to see basic shapes, simplify values, and discard unnecessary detail. I show several techniques including water soluble pen, aquash pencil, limited palette

Splash and scribble: wet watercolor and aquarelle pencils (video workshop)

Working with wet watercolor and aquarelle will help your journal sketching become more lively and spontaneous. Instead of carefully drawing lines and then coloring them in, we’ll invert the process, splashing down loose watercolor and then drawing into it to define shapes. We’ll also explore some special effects you can get with wet-on-wet watercolor. This approach

How to Draw Landscapes I (video workshop)

Master the five-minute landscape as you develop your plein-aire toolkit. Learn how to show depth in your landscapes (or any drawing). Discover tricks to help you quickly draw forests without getting sick of drawing trees. Explore simple guidelines to enhance your compositions. Experience the simplicity of the four value system and apply it to draw realistic rocks with ease.

Painting Shadows on Snow with Watercolor

Look deeply into shadows on snow. You will see beautiful blues and violets. Don’t be timid about adding these colors over snow. What a delight. Shadows on snow show the contours of snowdrifts. Pay attention to the way the angles change as the shadows move across the drifts. The shadows reveal the shape of the surface of