Taking a short tour around the Abbey Maulbronn takes not much more than an hour with plenty of time to sketch and take photographs. Spring, Autumn and Winter are the best seasons as to light and colors for a visit to Maulbronn. The view on the quiet lake is beautiful at around 17.30 -18.00 h [...]

Unfortunately I can’t remember where and how I found this film and the portfolio of the artist Alice Shirley.  The artist does amazing ink drawings. share: Bookmark on Delicious Digg this post Share with Stumblers Subscribe to the comments on this post Print for later Tell a friend

As long as there is no wind I still like to go out to sketch. I found a fairly dry place underneath the layers of beech foliage and decided to make notes of the forests grid of tree trunks. As I neglected the foliage this image looks like winter. I buy ink in bigger bottles [...]

The forest surprises and inspires me each time I go out. Usually before I do anything with my sketchbook in the woods I sit down to make some notes about what is around to see,smell and hear. That helps to make the “connection” to nature, to relax and to get ready for sketching. Today I [...]

During May I have spent a few evenings with some charcoal studies that will be published on Artgraphica.net. Gavin Banns the owner of that site had contacted me kindly asking for permission to use some of my tree drawing material published on Squidoo. He probably asked at the very right moment as I had plans [...]

There are some books one has to have. The tree of codes by Jonathan Safran Foer is one of those for me. Cover graphics and title got my attention immediately. There can be some sort of magic in books, especially in art and artists books, they can spark off ideas or close missing connections. Visual [...]

The show in Paris must have been great. I wish I had been able to see it. The website of DRAWING NOW is a bit odd to navigate: you need to go to the list of galleries and then open each gallery feature to see works. There are many different styles to see from representational [...]

Recently I updated my microsite about drawing deciduous trees. I used the line sketch above to illustrate basic steps that can help beginners to draw such complicated matter as a tree top. As first step I suggest to draw the shape of the tree in order to get familiar with the proportions of trunk and [...]

OLIVE TREE NEAR FOURFOURAS, roller ball pen, Sketchbook Crete, 2009 courtesy Albrecht Rissler. Today I want to point out to a recent addition to the blogroll of this blog “drawing landscape” by Albrecht Rissler. For all those who are interested in drawing landscapes and trees this new weblog will be a resource of inspiration. The [...]

This is an older plein air landscape study in charcoal. A soft eraser was very helpful to work out the field and grass in the foreground. As to the trees I kept things pretty much undefined in a more or less impressionistic manner. share: Bookmark on Delicious Digg this post Share with Stumblers Subscribe to [...]