Back by request: Heirloom Garden in Colored Pencil

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art classes, botanical art, butterflies, colored pencil, creativity, drawing, flowers, gardening, how to draw, illustration, sketchbook, Val Webb

Old-fashioned flowers! Veggies! Butterflies, bees and dragonflies! A new session of my popular online class, Heirloom Garden in Colored Pencil, starts Nov. 3. Work at your own pace, with five months to explore all 10 lessons. No experience necessary. Click here for more info.

Drawing the Heirloom Garden

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art classes, botanical art, butterflies, colored pencil, drawing, flowers, gardening, illustration, Val Webb

This week, we’re drawing old-fashioned roses in my online course, The Heirloom Garden in Colored Pencil. Romantic, gorgeous and wonderfully fragrant, these blooms have been a favorite throughout human history. Roses appear in ancient stone carvings… they were painted on the ceilings of Roman banquet rooms… knights carried them during the Crusades. The Empress Josephine was a passionate rose breeder. So was George Washington.

Don’t let the many-layered structure of rose “architecture” scare you off. There’s a natural sequence to drawing them, starting at the heart of the bloom and working your way to the edges. It’s a slow and enjoyable journey. Colors are layered, too, beginning with the lightest ones and building up a luxurious intensity. Put on your favorite music and make a cup of coffee, then sharpen those colored pencils. Think of it as drawing therapy.

The Heirloom Garden in Colored Pencil, a course consisting of 10 interactive lessons plus a bonus lesson, will be offered again in March. Click here for more info.

Because you asked: 2015 calendars!

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art, birds, botanical art, butterflies, colored pencil, creativity, drawing, gardening, illustration, Val Webb, watercolor

If you have followed my studio blog for a few years, you may remember the monthly printable hand-drawn and lettered Illustrated Garden calendars. They looked like this:

And this:

I loved drawing them. I loved sending them out to you. Then my illustration work increased and my online art courses blossomed, and I had to reluctantly put them aside. But you never forgot them… For nearly two years, emails have continued to arrive asking for the calendars to return.

“Please bring them back. My office is in a high-rise in New York City, but I can look at your calendar and feel connected to nature.”

“I loved these calendars! I used them to keep records of planting and harvest at a community garden.”

“Your calendar makes me smile.”

With such encouragement, how can I not draw new calendars for 2015? Sometimes, you just have to leap.

The 2015 Illustrated Garden calendar includes an 8 1/2 x 11 page for each month and will be emailed to you in printable pdf form on New Year’s Day, every inch hand-drawn and lettered in ink, watercolor and colored pencil. Besides lots of garden and bird lore, it marks the full moons, dates of the Solstice and Equinox, along with major holidays and some not-so-major but highly interesting ones.

The cost is $12. You may mail a check* (Val Webb, P.O. Box 2212, Fairhope, AL 36533) or click the button below to order through PayPal:

 

*If you choose to send a check, be sure to include the email address where you would like to receive your calendar.

Heirloom Garden in Colored Pencil

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art classes, botanical art, butterflies, colored pencil, creativity, drawing, flowers, how to draw, Val Webb

Old-fashioned flowers and their pollinators, including bees and butterflies, are the focus of a 10-lesson online course available on demand. “The Heirloom Garden in Colored Pencil” will provide detailed, step-by-step instruction in seeing and accurately drawing a wide range of flowering plants in graphite and colored pencil. No previous art experience needed.

The course is designed to be “work-at-your-own-pace.” Lessons are hosted on a password-protected site, and students have a full year to complete all 10 lessons. Personal instructor feedback and guidance is provided through email, as often as you wish.

The cost of the course is $50 for a limited time. To sign up, email studio@valwebb.com.

 

CLICK TO DOWNLOAD SUPPLY LIST

 

 

Add a pinch of salt…

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butterflies, colored pencil, creativity, drawing, fairies, illustration, tutorial, Val Webb, watercolor

If you liked the atmospheric effect created by dripping alcohol into watercolor wash in the earlier mermaid post, here’s a very similar drawing with a slightly different background texture. Sprinkling ordinary table salt into your freshly painted watercolor wash makes a rich, grainy texture that looks a little like crystals, a little like foliage. It’s a fun and slightly unpredictable way to make interesting backgrounds. I salted only the top and bottom of this small (4×6) rectangle, so that the middle would be smooth enough to add a fairy and her friend. They were painted in watercolor, with finishing details drawn in Prismacolor (the color is Terra Cotta).

Any type of salt will work. Using coarse salt, such as rock salt, results in a larger pattern. Sprinkle it directly into the wet watercolor layer, then allow it to dry completely. Overnight is ideal. Then the grains of salt can be brushed gently away to reveal the textures beneath.

This simple “profile view while holding something up” is a pose that works well if you are not yet comfortable drawing hands. While it offers plenty of possibilities — she could be holding up a small bird, a flower, a soap bubble, a friendly insect — it’s still rewarding to be able to choose whether or not you wish to paint realistic hands. Click here to see my tutorial on drawing them.

Draw & Paint Monarch Butterflies

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Alabama, art classes, butterflies, colored pencil, drawing, how to draw, painting, Val Webb, watercolor, workshops

I’m delighted to offer a new workshop, “Draw and Paint Monarch Butterflies,” at beautiful 5 Rivers Delta Resource Center on Saturday, January 12. Working from actual specimens, with step-by-step guidance, learn to create a realistic monarch using gouache and colored pencil on handmade buff paper. No experience is necessary and all supplies are provided. Class size is limited to 10. The cost is $65, and illustrated gift certificates are available if you plan to use the workshop as a Christmas gift. Email me to reserve a spot.

Two more things about the workshop: We’ll meet from 10 to 4, so bring a sack lunch to enjoy on the deck during our midday break.

Also, it’s important to me that you know our butterfly specimens were not wild-caught and killed. They were raised from egg to caterpillar to cocoon to adult, allowed to live a natural life and then after they died were carefully collected for our use. Butterfly farming preserves habitat and discourages destructive land use; it can also be helpful in supporting threatened species. Just so you know.

Free as a bird…

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art, birds, botanical art, butterflies, calendar, colored pencil, creativity, drawing, flowers, food, free, gardening, giveaway, illustration, sketchbook, Val Webb

…and just in time for spring planting, here’s my first printable garden calendar page. (I’ll have April ready to post in a few days.) This is my little gift to the world, and I will gladly send a pdf file, as each new page is completed, to anyone who asks. March is ready for you this very minute, so drop me a note at studio@valwebb.com . Enjoy!

Two butterfly tiles

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butterflies, ecology, pottery

Carved raku butterfly tiles by Val Webb - $45

Lately, I’ve been carving butterflies — quite a few of them. It’s fun to try to capture their delicate wing structure and vivid color patterns in clay and glaze… and it’s a humane alternative to beautiful (but very dead) framed butterfly specimens. Early last year, when some entomologists predicted the demise of the world’s monarch population within 50 years, plenty of people were skeptical. Now it seems that this lovely species may have considerably less time remaining: 80 percent of the Oyamel fir trees upon which they overwinter have now been lost to illegal logging in Mexico, and torrential rains may have killed half the migratory population last year. The forecast seems grim.

Want to help the monarchs out? You can, in three simple ways:

Plant milkweed. Monarch butterflies only lay their eggs on milkweed plants, and native milkweeds are increasingly rare. If you’re not sure where to find seeds in your area, there are some great sources online who can provide seeds and advice for milkweeds that will thrive in your climate zone.

Avoid pesticide use on your lawn and garden.  Chemicals in pesticides can drift, and are harmful to monarch caterpillars and adults.

 Eat organic foods. Glyphosate herbicides, routinely sprayed on corn and soybean crops in the United States, play a major role in monarch population loss. (And they aren’t good for you, either.)

They’re small steps, but important ones. And they can help ensure that your great-grandchildren will get to see migrating monarchs.

The iris and the swallowtail

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botanical art, butterflies, flowers, pottery, raku, Val Webb

Remember the Lousiana iris I was carving into a slab of raku clay a while back? It’s all finished now… just in time to make its public debut at the opening of the Entre’ Arts studio/cafe/gallery tomorrow night.

Making a mark

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art, butterflies, drawing, gardening, illustration, Val Webb

Once in a while, an art commission comes along that becomes an unexpected source of great enjoyment. The drawing process takes on a life of its own, and I feel almost like a spectator as the image takes shape on the paper. That’s what happened recently, and here is the result. I haven’t done a pencil portrait in years, so it was fun to watch this one unfold.

Meanwhile, in the garden, I’m slowly working my way through the not-so-enjoyable process of clearing the summer beds. Over the next couple of weeks — working in the early mornings, before the mercury reaches those stifling 90s — we’ll spade up the soil to loosen and aerate it, then add a layer of compost from the bin.  The winter garden is my favorite.

…And, in the rapidly dwindling fennel patch, 25 fat Eastern Swallowtail larvae are munching, munching, munching the days away. Click here to see how far they’ve come in four short days!