A typical November day, drizzling rain, moist air and a colossal grey sky with slowly moving clouds. I tried hard to capture those thin clouds that smoked from the wooded hill named “Burgberg” in the background. I have been there on top to meet the “Schreckstein” which translates to “the stone that scares you”. And [...]

This small gouache sketch with a view on local vine yards was done on the 1st of November in sunshine. I taped the paper to get a clear borderline, I had seen this on Nathan Fawkes Land Sketch blog.The autumn foliage is at its peak at the end of October to the first days of [...]

At the end of October and beginning of November the colors of autumn seem to peak in our forest and gardens here. I was on the way into the woods but decided to stay on a meadow with some fruit trees and an old garden shack near the forest edge. I am experimenting with primed [...]

Forest Diary by Martin Stankewitz | Make Your Own Book The re-print of the entire forest diary sketchbook is now available as color paperback in the Blurb bookstore. The book preview shows the all 158 pages. The size of the book is 6X9 inches, it has more than 100 images,the book weight is 275 grams. [...]

A couple of days ago I went to the same place I started the forest diary sketchbook on a grey afternoon in January 2009. I started with a humble sketch in ink, black and white,which still reminds me of those insecure days when the financial crisis hit. Now at beginning of autumn 2011 the scenery [...]

This gouache sketch was done rather quickly without building a background first. Instead I started with the tree trunks in black and added the other elements step by step and modifying colours by sketching wet in wet.

Buy this sketch as postcard on Zazzle This sketch was done in two sessions starting as usual from the back and painting/sketching towards the foreground. Each state of the sketch could be seen as a kind of under painting for the next stage. The sequence of images below documents some of the intermediate states of [...]

Buy this sketch as postcard on Zazzle The end of summer has come with some hot days, but autumn is near. The sound of falling acorns can be heard everywhere and the cobwebs glisten in the evening sun. The growth of foliage on trees, undergrowth and grass is at its peak now. Each and every [...]

Recently I stumbled on the website of Robert Perry,a British landscape painter who works in gouache. Mr. Perry has published an impressive video which shows him in action on location handling a large format gouache painting. In 1993 Mr. Perry put down his job as a teacher and became a full-time artist to support himself [...]

Buy this sketch as postcard on Zazzle July has been to moist and too cold for the season, but I do not mind. Hot weather is not for me. I prefer 15-19 °Celsius. In other words the weather on 30th of July was perfect this year. Today I wanted to sketch the forest ground, a [...]