Burlingame Library

“Curiouser and curiouser!” Cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English).” ― Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Curiosity is not a trait you are born with. It is a skill that you can develop and refine with practice.It is more essential than any Read More

Join the Nature Journal Club for a 1.5 hour workshop to round out our exploration of mammal anatomy, structure, and drawing techniques. This will be a fun draw along lecture so bring your sketchbook and pencil. In this workshop we will: Explore ways of rotating a simple mammal model in your head so that you can draw the Read More

Did you ever draw a cow that looked like a dog? Learn basic principles of drawing mammal heads and faces that solve the most common problems artists encounter.  Discover the importance of eye placement and shape. Learn the primary muscles that make prominent bulges and masses on the head. Study the dynamics of common animal Read More

Learn techniques to quickly and accurately draw mammals in the field. This workshop will focus on understanding key points of mammal anatomy that help you pose and draw mammals from any angle.  Learn how to: Understand basic mammal skeletal structure and the key differentiations between major groups. Simplify complex muscle masses to essential lines. Rotate Read More

Let's reinvent the wheel in this hands on color mixing workshop. If you learned that red, yellow, and blue are the primary colors you have been sold a bill of goods that is guaranteed to make muddy colors.  Learn a better color triad that will help you easily mix the colors you want when you Read More

In this workshop we  will explore landscape drawing 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 unecessary detail. I will demonstrate several techniques including water soluable pen, aquash pencil, limited palette watercolor, Tombo pen, and Read More

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 Read More

Special guest lecture with instructor Mark Simmons Perspective allows us to create the illusion of three-dimensional space on the flat page. Though it may seem intimidating, a basic understanding of perspective gives us a bag of tricks that we can use to add a sense of depth and distance to our scenes, and convincing volume Read More