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.

Dragonfly days

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art classes, botanical art, colored pencil, nature drawing, Val Webb

I always think of my mom when I draw dragonflies — she loved them. She had dragonfly scarves, dragonfly jewelry, dragonfly garden art. A writer, she doodled tiny dragonflies in the margins of her notebooks. During the last week of her life, when she could no longer leave her bed, the biggest dragonfly I’ve ever seen landed on her windowsill and stayed for hours.

So, when I was looking for an insect subject to demonstrate drawing on earth-stained paper, I naturally thought of dragonflies. This fellow is drawn with just two colored pencils, a black and a white, but the warmth and complexity of the stained paper makes him so much more. He’s part of a demo video for my Botanical Sketchbook Painting class, which gets under way on Tuesday. I can’t wait!

Exactly one month from today…

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art classes, botanical art, colored pencil, creativity, drawing, flowers, illustration, Val Webb

…a new session of “Heirloom Garden in Colored Pencil” will begin.

Back by popular demand, this course includes 10 lessons on drawing old-fashioned flowers and vegetable plants — plus how to draw water droplets, transparent glass and favorite garden insects. Butterflies! Bees! Dragonflies! All in colored pencil. More info is available on my Upcoming Online Classes page.

Bees, blooms and “Mad Honey Disease”

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botanical art, colored pencil, drawing, flowers, illustration, journal, Val Webb

One of my favorite parts of drawing garden subjects is the unexpected discovery of some startling bit of botanical history — a story that pops up like an unexpected seedling and demands to be shared. It happened recently during preparation for my online course, The Heirloom Garden in Colored Pencil. A strange story about rhododendrons wrapped its roots around my imagination and wouldn’t let go.

Rhododendrons (and their popular relative, azaleas) produce pollen that contains a small amount of potent neurotoxin. Called grayanotoxin, it’s not harmful under ordinary circumstances… but occasionally, when concentrated by honeybees as they make rhododendron honey, it can cause a nasty illness marked by hallucinations and digestive distress. Although rare today — the most recent US cases on record happened in Seattle in 2011 — “mad honey disease” has a special place in history.

A clever first-century general defeated an entire invading army by putting grayanotoxin to work. During a battle in the Black Sea region in 67 BC, Pompey ordered his troops to leave honeycomb laced with “mad honey” along the path of approaching Roman soldiers. The hungry invaders took the bait. Sickened and disoriented, the Romans were no match for the waiting enemy.

The rhododendron, then, is much more than just a pretty face. Grow them, celebrate their history… but don’t put your beehives too close by.

 

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.

An old garden and a new adventure

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art classes, botanical art, colored pencil, creativity, drawing, flowers, gardening, sketchbook, Val Webb

The autumn breeze that stirs stalk and leaf in this 18th Century garden carries a drowsy hint of lavender. Four sprawling raised beds are arranged in the good German tradition: a square hemmed with pickets, divided by a stone pathway in the shape of a cross.
It’s early October in the kitchen garden at Schifferstadt, an imposing Maryland farmhouse built in 1758. Most of the season’s harvest has come and gone, leaving brown skeletons to rattle their dried-out seed heads in the chilly sunlight. But the hardiest botanicals are still green and several remain stubbornly in bloom: French lavender, flowering tobacco, calendula, yarrow.

Nearly three weeks into my road trip, I’m now in the valley just beyond the easternmost ridge of the Blue Ridge Mountains, not far from the presidential retreat at Camp David. I’m gathering material on heirloom plants for my upcoming online course, The Heirloom Garden in Colored Pencil. And so I spent an afternoon sharing the Schifferstadt plots with the bees and mantises, marveling over colonial plants I rarely see in my own subtropical climate zone.

The biggest plantings were those varieties offering the widest range of practical uses in the farmer’s household. One particularly choice slice of garden real estate was occupied by Lady’s Bedstraw (Galium verum), a feathery groundcover with an astonishing job description: it is a vegetable rennet for making cheese, a delightfully honey-scented mattress stuffing material, the roots produce red dye and the flowers yield a yellow hair rinse reputed to be popular with young milkmaids.

I’m traveling in my camper studio, “Beatrix,” with two canine co-pilots, Atticus and Jo. Two weeks ago, we made our way up through the fall wildflowers of Georgia and Virginia to spend some time in the rolling ridges near Washington D.C. Tomorrow, we’ll turn the steering wheel southward and roll down through Tennessee and Mississippi, back home to coastal Alabama and the little farmhouse at the end of the road. I have lots of fresh material for the Heirloom Garden course, courtesy of Maryland’s abundant flora. It has been a good journey.

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.

Under the sea

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colored pencil, creativity, drawing, illustration, Val Webb, watercolor

A fun technique that creates a soothing and mysterious atmosphere: put down a rich watercolor wash in two or more shades of blue. Drip rubbing alcohol into the wet paint to create bubbles. Then use only white (or, in this case, white and pale green) to draw your subject. Don’t draw too much –leave parts of the scene to the imagination of the viewer. Fun!