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.

Sometimes staining can be a good thing

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art, art classes, botanical art, creativity, flowers, how to draw, illustration, sketchbook, Val Webb

Speaking as someone who once spilled an entire mocha latte down the front of my shirt 15 minutes before I was due to speak before a workshop group, I can vouch for the staining power of coffee. But it’s that very characteristic that makes coffee a terrific alternative painting medium — it stains white paper with a gorgeous (and delightfully aromatic) brown tone similar to a watercolor wash. This page in my 2008 sketchbook is painted and lettered with three varieties of my favorite beverage:

I love drawing and painting on stained paper, with its raw warmth and sometimes-bark-sometimes-leather texture. We used earth-based acrylic pigment to stain sheets of watercolor paper in my recent North Carolina workshop. Dogwoods were blooming in the mountain coves, so we drew them in layered colored pencil and charcoal:

This week, I’m staining lots of paper in front of a video camera in preparation for the upcoming Botanical Sketchbook Painting course. The best part is the fact that you never get the same result twice — each sheet is uniquely smudged and pocked, each with its own rustic beauty. The second best part is the fact that… well… someone has to drink all that leftover coffee.

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.

A member of the breakfast club

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Alabama, birds, drawing, illustration, journal, sketchbook, Val Webb, watercolor

He’s becoming a regular, arriving after the bossy cardinal couple and before the mourning doves. Red-bellied woodpeckers are year-round residents here, and apparently they have a hearty appetite for seeds. “My” woodpecker is a male, easily recognized by his red cowl. Females display a red patch only on the backs of their necks. (Despite their name, you can watch these birds for hours and never catch a glimpse of their red-tinged belly feathers. But the bold black-and-white bars on their wings and their bright caps make it easy to identify them anyway. Bon apetit, Mr. Woodpecker.)

Just a little sketch

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drawing, fairies, illustration, journal, sketchbook, Val Webb

 

I love drawing fish. This fellow, and his little naiad passenger, appeared in the corner of a sketchbook page this week. A few minutes later, they were joined by some friends:

More than meets the eye

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art classes, creativity, drawing, fairies, illustration, sketchbook, Val Webb

What do you get when you combine figure drawing, plant/animal/insect sketches, basic watercolor techniques, drawing natural habitat — then season the mixture with fairy tale illustration? An interactive online course called Draw & Paint Fairies in Nature, which begins next week. There are still a few places left in this work-at-your-own-pace, personally guided drawing adventure. Here’s the sequence of our 10 lessons — the “Draw” segment of each is done in students’ sketchbooks, and the “Paint” segment is done in simple watercolor with a bit of colored pencil:

Lesson 1: Where do fairies come from? Draw: Val’s four-step sketch technique, infant proportions, simple facial features, sketch exercise. Paint: Using gouache, making skin tones, glazing and lifting color, baby fairy project.

Lesson 2: How do fairies fly? Draw: Toddler proportions, drawing different kinds of wings, sketch exercise. Paint: Very young fairy in flight.

Lesson 3: Why do fairies love flowers? Draw: Six-year-old proportions, drawing favorite flowers, sketch exercise. Paint: Garden fairy child.

Lesson 4: What do fairies wear? Draw: Older child proportions, creating clothing from nature, creating clothing for fairy royalty, drawing fabric, drawing fairy hats and caps, sketch exercise. Paint:  Your own fairy finery.

Lesson 5: Where do fairies live? Draw: Teen proportions, sketching fairy habitats, sketch exercise. Paint: A fairy at home.

Lesson 6:  Why do birds allow fairies to ride on their backs? Draw: Adult female fairy proportions, drawing birds, drawing the seated figure, sketch exercise. Paint: Fairy riding a favorite bird.

Lesson 7:  Who are the fairies’ other friends?  Draw: Adult male fairy proportions, drawing small woodland creatures, sketch exercise.  Paint: Fairy with a furry friend of your choice.

Lesson 8:  Can fairies live in the water? Draw: Water sprites and naiads, drawing fins and scales, sketch exercise. Paint: Water sprite painted over a toned color wash, a trick for creating bubbles, creating very unusual skin tones.

Lesson 9:  Are fairies always young? Draw: Older adult proportions and features, how to show age and wisdom, how to draw gray or white hair, sketch exercise. Paint: A fairy godmother.

Lesson 10:  Are all fairies good?  Draw: Expressive faces and actions – how to show a sly or mischievous nature, how to tell a story with your drawing, sketch exercise. Paint: A trickster fairy.

It looks as if…

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art classes, drawing, fairies, illustration, sketchbook, Val Webb

…this fairy sketch is flying away with my pencil! I’m having fun creating the illustrations for my upcoming online course, Draw & Paint Fairies in Nature. I’ll share some of my favorite drawings and watercolors here as they are completed. Stay tuned!

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.

Marion

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Alabama, art, drawing, illustration, journal, sketchbook, Val Webb

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!