
Learn to create a complete garden scene by rapidly mixing greens, using close-up leaves and expressive pen-and-ink lines, and capturing your unique marks with bold color in a nature sketchbook.
Learn to mix greens for garden sketches with sap green, Hooker's green, viridian, AZO yellow, and Prussian blue. Capture yellowish greens and blue greens while noting a real-world palette.
If you'd like to work from my photo, I've attached it here. Feel free to use your own photos or real-life scenes as well.
Apply darker lines to add weight and define light and shadow. Observe where light hits foliage, then layer with a darker pen to reveal depth before watercolor.
Master painting big shapes by starting with a clean sky wash, then block in grass and roofs with broad colors, allowing wet-into-wet blending and white highlights to define light.
Explore garden watercolor techniques, from water glaze and wet-on-wet color drops to gravity-driven movements, dry-on-dry layering, lifting, and shadow work using cobalt blue, sap green, and shadow violet.
I've attached a leaf photo that you can download, but I really recommend that you find a leaf or flower and work from life for this exercise.
Feel free to use my leaf photo or bring a leaf into your studio to draw!
Rose photo attached
Capture floral studies from the garden journal using simple line work, saturated color, and ink shading to convey vibrancy in hydrangeas and roses, with paint splatters and outdoor water effects.
Thanks so much for joining me! Take a look at a few more journal pages and get ready to go outside with your sketchbook.
When it comes to creating a garden or nature journal, there’s so much that you can explore with paint and ink.
In this class, we’re going to focus on creating a complete garden scene, with a variety of plants and even a little structure peeking out from behind the foliage.
And in order to do that, we’re going to tackle one of the most challenging aspects of sketching the natural world: quickly mixing a variety of greens.
I’ve taken a lot of art classes over the years, and I think that sometimes painters can get a little too technical when it comes to greens. So in this class I’m going to simplify and demystify greens, so we can get on with our painting!
But that’s not all! Garden and nature journals come to life when you use watercolors to capture the intense, luminous colors you see in flowers, leaves, and other details. So we’re also going to work on ways to really push the paints towards bold, vibrant colors.
We’ll work on loose and expressive pen and ink lines, too. I’m going to show you my approach to creating lines and marks and shapes that look entirely original-- like something that could only be made by you, at that particular place and that particular moment in time.
What we’re not going to do is get caught up in perfection or rigid accuracy. The great joy of a garden and nature journal is that it is a record of the time you spent in close observation. It’s a place for you to be yourself on the page.
With a little ink and watercolor, and some time to enjoy the outdoors, you can create a lively, personal record of your connection to nature.