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.

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.

New online course: Draw & Paint Six Culinary Herbs

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art classes, botanical art, colored pencil, drawing, gardening, how to draw, illustration, painting, tutorial, Val Webb, watercolor

It’s not your typical botanical drawing course. My new online class series, “Draw & Paint Six Culinary Herbs,” will incorporate all the things that make the humble kitchen garden a place of a thousand small delights. In addition to learning to create softly shaded pencil studies, spirited ink-and-wash sketches and richly layered color renderings that combine watercolor and colored pencil, we’ll also explore the history and folklore associated with our six herbs. Each lesson will include art demo videos, printable illustrated instruction pages and photo tutorials posted on our private class website — as well as illustrated tips on growing, harvesting and using our culinary collection. I’m also sharing my own stock of organic herb seed (from my garden, while supplies last) with anyone who asks when they sign up. Email me for a list of available varieties.

The course is designed so that you can work at your own pace, without ever feeling rushed. Lessons will appear weekly beginning January 7 on a private, password-protected website. All 10 lessons will remain there until May 6. During those four months, you have access to the lessons anytime you wish to work on them. Feel free to take a week off (or even a month) for other activities. You’ll still have plenty of time to complete the course. Each lesson will include:

• My video demo with step-by-step guidance for each new technique
• Printable color instruction pages
• Examples for each lesson, created to guide and inspire you
• Personal help when needed, and feedback when each lesson is completed
• Access to our own private online group where you can share comments and images with others taking the course around the world. (Participation in the group is optional. No instruction will take place there.)

Art topics covered in the course include:

• How to develop the habit of looking deeply at your subject, so that you clearly see and understand its structure
• Three steps to creating a quick and accurate foundation sketch
• How to draw leaves in perspective
• My “gentle pencil” technique for softly shaded pencil studies
• How to combine ink and wash for fast and elegant herb drawings
• Traditional layering of watercolor and colored pencil to build a richly detailed rendering
• Color matching and color mixing – including highlights and shadows
• The structure of an herb plant, and some basic terminology

Absolutely no experience is necessary. The supply list is simple, and contains no exotic materials. (In fact, if you recently took my online watercolor lettering course, you already have the brushes you’ll need. You can check them off your list!)

What about technology? Well, you will need four basic tools to “attend” this online class:

• A computer, or access to one
• An email account to receive informative messages or send in your work for feedback
• A way to print out your illustrated instruction pages
• A way to send images of your completed projects to me for feedback. You can use either a scanner or a digital camera to create an image, then email it.

The cost of the entire course is $50, which is payable by personal check, money order or through PayPal. (To use PayPal, let me know you want to join the class and I will send you a secure PayPal invoice with an embedded “pay now” button.) Email me to sign up, or if you need additional information. See you soon!

Citrus: some pencil studies

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Alabama, art, botanical art, drawing, food, gardening, illustration, sketchbook, Val Webb

I love drawing the texture of an orange peel. It requires a very light touch and some time spent looking deeply at surface light and shadow. These studies in pencil are a preliminary to a color illustration that will combine all four. Can you name them all? (The answers are at the end of this post.)
The first sketch is a satsuma. The second is a satsuma, partially peeled. The third is a Meyer lemon. The fourth is a pair of kumquats. Now I’m hungry.

An old favorite and a new technique

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botanical art, drawing, flowers, gardening, illustration, painting, Val Webb, watercolor

I love coneflowers… and my very favorite is Echinacea purpurea. I grow it in my garden, draw it, paint it and carve it into clay tiles. This one was painted in gouache, allowed to dry thoroughly, then brushed with a coat of waterproof India ink and scrubbed under running water. The final step was to add a bit of ink detail on the leaves and petals with an 01 Pigma Micron drawing pen. I like the final effect; it reminds me of vintage illustration. As soon as my busy studio schedule slows a tiny bit, I will post a step-by-step tutorial, so you can try it out for yourself.

Evening Sun

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art, botanical art, drawing, flowers, gardening, illustration, painting, Val Webb, watercolor

I was late planting sunflowers this spring, so while the cut-flower fields at the edge of town are already resplendent with buttery yellow blooms, mine are still all stalks and leaves on the ascent. I always try to include my favorite, Evening Sun (Helianthus annuus) in the garden patch mix. Velvety red petals with a touch of yellow – and dense centers the color of bittersweet chocolate – make them wonderful to draw. This one is painted in gouache and India ink on heavy watercolor paper.

Name that herb!

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Alabama, art, art classes, botanical art, gardening, how to draw, painting, Val Webb, watercolor, workshops

Six culinary herbs in watercolor… can you name them all?

(I’m painting some samples for a June 30 workshop, “Draw and Paint Six Culinary Herbs,” to be offered in Birmingham, Alabama. Join me for a day of creative botanical fun… no previous experience required, and all supplies are provided. Best of all, you get to take home six organically grown potted herb plants at the end of the day!)

Give your fire ants a tea party

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Alabama, fire ants, gardening, green living, organic

Three blocks from my garden, I can stand at the edge of Mobile Bay and see the shipping channel way off to the southwest — the very route that a cargo ship from South America took on a balmy day in the 1920s, its crew unaware that the soil they carried as ballast was infested with red fire ants. The ants loved everything about Alabama: warm temperatures, abundant food supplies, lots of moisture — and best of all, the predator species who control fire ant populations had missed the boat and were still back home in the Southern Hemisphere.

Now they range from Texas to Maryland, pushing ever farther into the northern states as winters turn milder. And, despite a few redeeming qualities — they eat cockroach eggs, for example — fire ants are bad news for your garden. Their mounds are sprawling and destructive, they will damage or consume a surprising assortment of soft-fleshed vegetables, and a busy colony can wipe out beneficial insects (and lizards and even small birds) with speedy efficiency. They can also sting the daylights out of you in a synchronized attack, using a pheromone signal to coordinate dozens of ants who swarm up your arm or leg, simultaneously bite to get a grip and then use their stingers to deliver a burning dose of toxic venom. Recent studies of the active ingredient in that venom reveal some antibiotic and anti-HIV qualities, but I have not found much comfort in that as I frantically scramble for the garden hose to rinse off two dozen stinging fire ants.

After throwing an arsenal of chemical insecticides at the ever-growing fire ant population over the years, and only succeeding in wiping out large populations of competitive ant species to give fire ants even better odds in their quest for world domination, we humans have given up on eradication. County extension services now advise gardeners on fire ant management. For people like me, who shudder at the prospect of using chemical ant baits anywhere near the organic veggie patch, there is a tiny glimmer of hope in the gradual rise of the phorid fly. As tiny as the nostril on a Lincoln penny, it has a life cycle like a Stephen King novel: the little fly hovers above a fire ant and lays a microscopic egg in the ant’s shiny brown thorax. When the fly larvae hatches, it dines awhile on non-vital ant innards and then migrates to its ultimate destination, the ant’s head. Now the ant’s body is no longer useful to the larva, so it releases an enzyme which dissolves the neck membrane and makes the ant’s head fall off. Yikes. Compared to the fate of being decapitated by a hungry parasite, my own fire ant management technique seems almost humane.

I invite my fire ants to join me for tea. Well, actually, they don’t get much past the steeping part. Decades ago, when I read that boiling water could be used as an effective ant control, I started carrying my steaming tea kettle out into the garden and poured its contents over fire ant mounds with consistently good results. A medium-sized mound in the garden takes about a gallon and a half (three large tea kettles) and I have discovered that it’s not necessary to dig beneath the surface or to drench everything that moves — you are not killing the colony, which lies mostly well below the surface, but you are providing them with a powerful incentive to move away. And they do. I have poured boiling water into cracks in walkways, along the edges of raised beds and at the foundation line of fire-ant-infested sheds and most often, they are gone within two days. Sometimes a second tea party is needed. Also, remember that boiling water will kill garden plants and beneficial insects, so pour with discretion.

And then have a nice cup of Earl Grey.