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Welcome to Draw Tip Tuesday!

You often see those ribbons or banners, used with great lettering. On chalkboards at hipster places, and all over Instagram and Pinterest, right? It looks very cool and it looks kind of complicated. But it’s not!
Here’s how you make those banners.

  Want more videos? Subscribe to my Youtube Channel!

The post Draw Tip Tuesday – Drawing Ribbons appeared first on Make Awesome Art.

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Each week, along with the Sketchbook Skool students, I am doing the homework assignment from the kourse called “Beginning”. Except for last week, because I taught that klass myself. We’re in the third week now and this week’s teacher is Prashant Miranda. From India, he inspires the klass to draw the sky – no matter where in the world you are.

I did my homework in Amsterdam, looking out of my living room window and up to the clouds. I wasn’t quite sure what I was doing with my watercolors and I don’t even know if I particularly like the art that I made, but it was great fun to play with my watercolors and step out of my comfort zone for this one too!

The post Painting the Sky appeared first on Make Awesome Art.

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I am so excited that in Sketchbook Skool, we keep adding amazing artists to our Fakulty. Nina Johansson, who is a fantastic illustrator, urban sketcher and watercolourist is officially joining us, and I just got back from Stockholm, where we filmed a bunch of lessons with her.
She is very inspiring, and so is her art, but Nina is also my kinda gal – positive, passionate, skillful and she has a great sense of humour to top it all off.

We’d been preparing for the video shoot via email and Skype – and then meeting in person is such a treat – especially since she’s been such a great host to make my stay in Stockholm convenient and fun.
Thanks to all great prep work and to our creative film crew, everything went smooth and we had a lot of fun during the shoot!

 

 

An extra treat after wrapping up was having dinner and a sketch with Nina in the center of Stockholm, celebrating our accomplishment.

And on my way back, I made good use of my travel time and enjoyed drawing.

I absolutely love how the drawing below turned out – using just a fountain pen and a grey brushpen. It also opened up an interesting conversation with two of the flight attendants who spotted my drawing. I love how art can connect!

 

 

The post Sketchbook Skool News: Nina Johansson! appeared first on Make Awesome Art.

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Last Friday, the new term inSketchbook Skool started, and it’s pretty exciting! Not only am I teaching my class on sketching food, called ‘Draw It Like It’s Hot’, also the 6-week kourses ‘Beginning’ and ‘Expressing’ are happening as we speak! And it’s not too late to sign up!
This week’s teacher in the kourse called ‘Beginning’ is Sketchbook Skool’s co-founder Danny Gregory, and we’re off to a great start!
His klass is all about how drawing makes us feel and that we all are creative – in our own way.
As Sketchbook Skool’s head master and head mistress, Danny and I alternate doing the homework assignments along with all the others in the Sketchbook Skool Kommunity.

So here’s what I came up with this week, for his homework called ‘Draw And Feel’

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Today I will be live streaming on Facebook! I’ll show you some of my favourite sketchbook pages, give you some ideas on how to fill your daily sketchbook pages, and if you’d like to ask any questions you’d like me to answer, you can!

The event takes place at 18:00 my time, (CET), which is Noon EST, and if you’re in Australia it’s actually 2 am on Friday… sorry about that! Well, have a night cap with me or watch the rerun later.

Sign up for the event on Facebook by following this link. This is also where you can leave your questions on beforehand, so you’ll make sure I get to answer them! See you on Facebook!

The post Join me for lunch. Or dinner. Or a night cap. appeared first on Make Awesome Art.

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Wake up and smell the crayons!

Do you like making art? Do you like making food?
Then I think you are gonna love my 4-week online art class ‘Draw It Like It’s Hot!’ It’s all about sketching food and illustrating recipes!

Why wait? class starts this Friday! Come along and join ‘Draw It Like It’s Hot!” for only $69! Click here to enroll

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Beginning a new sketchbook can be quite exciting and a little bit scary. You don’t know what the paper will be like, how it will combine with your favourite art tools, whether or not you’re going to like it as much as the previous sketchbook you just filled and got kind of attached to… and above all a lot of people fear that first blank page. WHAT to do with it? It has to be meaningful, because it’s a new beginning, it should be a great drawing because it’s the first page of many to follow. Really?

I mean, really really?

No. It’s just the first page. Go for it, if the drawing isn’t as great as you hoped, there is a whole sketchbook left to make up for that flawed drawing. And does it HAVE to be meaningful? Says who?

I got this Stillman and Birn sketchbook on a trip to New York and dived right into it. I sat on the couch and my husband was playing the banjo so I thought I’d draw him. A nice way to practice gesture drawings, hands, faces. as soon as I put the first lines onto the paper I knew things were going to be out of proportion, but I went along with it anyway. To fix things a little, I kept adding things and used hatching lines, and added a bit of blue watercolor. Then I just flipped the page and went on with the next one, not really thinking about it that much and leaving the left page blank.
Then, in Sketchbook Skool‘s kourse ‘Polishing’, we have an amazing Mixed Media artist: Juliana Coles. I am so happy for her to join the Fakulty! What she does is a different style of art journaling than we’ve covered so far in Sketchbook Skool. She layers her pages with drawings, paint, collage, lettering and anything she can find and feels the page needs. she uses writing to spill her thoughts or emotions onto the page and by adding layers of colours and lettering and photos and more paint, she builds very personal, emotional and just beautiful sketchbook pages. She keeps polishing the pages, getting back to them again and again, sometimes over the years. A page is never a finished piece – it can keep evolving and that is so interesting!
It is so different from what I do, and I need to take a big step out of my comfort zone to actually do this mixed media stuff. But outside of the comfort zone IS where the magic happens so I love that challenge! And this is one of the beautiful things about Sketchbook Skool. One week you may be completely inside my comfort zone drawing a meal following Matthew Midgley‘s lead, and a week later you’re exploring and discovering a whole new approach to making art!

So Juliana gives the Sketchbook Skool Students a piece of homework to do the same. She suggests you can look for a page in your sketchbook that you don’t like so much (or that you DO like), and start spicing it up.
So I took out lots of art tools, even ones that I hadn’t used for quite a while and dusted those off, took that page above, and this is what I made:

I also made a video to share my process with the Sketchbook Skool Students, and this is it:

 

The post How To Fix Flaws appeared first on Make Awesome Art.

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As a kid in school, I was never really great at doing homework. I mean, I did it – oh yes I was quite the miss goodie two shoes, but I never managed to get super high grades for the subjects I wasn’t into that much. The only homework I never procrastinated on was for art class. Nothing much has changed over the years. I really enjoyed doing this week’s Sketchbook Skool homework in the brand new kourse “Polishing”, in which Danny Gregory shows us how to use everyday things and conversations to create pages in your sketchbook graphic novel style.As headmaster and headmistress of Sketchbook Skool, Danny and I want to learn from the amazing fakulty, so each week, we alternate doing the homework assignments from “Polishing”.

As headmaster and headmistress of Sketchbook Skool, Danny and I want to learn from the amazing fakulty, so each week, we alternate doing the homework assignments from “Polishing”.
You can, by the way, still sign up for it! Sign up at Sketchbookskool.com

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Did you ever get stuck in a rut? I bet you did. We all do, every now and then. getting back into the groove, picking up the creative habit again – that may need a bit of kicking-yourself-in-the-pants, but boy once you are making art again, you wish you never stopped!
Or maybe you find yourself stuck in making art using the same tools and techniques, and you feel a bit bored by it. Or you feel uninspired, looking for new approaches, challenges and ideas.

Well, get ready to polish up your skills and your art journal pages!

I just finished editing my video lessons for the new Sketchbook Skool Kourse called ‘Polishing’.

In my klass, I teach about negative spaces and we’ll go outside for a location drawing.
But _man_, there’s a lot of goodness in this kourse: 5 other fabulous illustrators fill the 6 week online Kourse with a variety of approaches to sketchbook keeping and making art part of your life.

Just this Friday, Danny Gregory kicked off with his lesson, which has a comic book style theme – pretty awesome, so don’t miss out!

To find out more and join ‘Polishing’ in Sketchbook Skool, click here

The post How To Make It Shiny And New! appeared first on Make Awesome Art.

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When I pick up a sketchbook I filled, and go through it’s pages I filled, it’s always so wonderful to realize that each page contains memories. Memories that go beyond that one little sketch. The lines are reminders of other things I didn’t even capture with my pen, but they are tied to the ink lines anyway. I remember where I was sitting, I remember the sounds I heard, even the smells around me… And I can tell how I felt: if I felt happy, grumpy, relaxed, pre-occupied, stressed. It’s quite interesting to see in my sketchbooks what kinds of phases I went through as well. In Sketchbook Skool, we are getting everything ready to launch the new term, on April 15. There is so much work to do for the launch of a new Kourse, it amazes each time. Then I am annoyed with myself that I’m surprised by the amount of work because by now I should know, right? Well, I guess it takes a while, and more experience too, before we are so well organized that we will have everything ready in time. And to be honest I think working hardest right before deadlines is probably part of, and contributing to the creative process.

So. While I am busy doing my last edits for the videos in the klass I am teaching in the brand new Sketchbook Skool, my sketchbook pages get less attention. I’ll make a hasty sketch here and there, or I’ll draw my food quickly – just to get my daily fix of sketching. I’ll be polishing up my pages when I can breathe again. It’s fine, because I am SO excited about what takes up most of my time at the moment!!

Have a look yourself, and join us on April 15 in ‘Polishing’

Six weeks of fun and polishing your art, taught by 6 illustrators from around the world.
You’ll be surrounded by an amazing group of classmates, and you’ll be part of that awesome inspiring, global community.
What are you waiting for? Get ready to polish up your art and sign up for Sketchbook Skool’s ‘Polishing’ today!

The post Shiny News! appeared first on Make Awesome Art.

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It’s 2 years ago Danny and I opened the Sketchbook Skool doors and offered our first Kourse, called ‘Beginning’.
Every single day I feel blessed because of the wonderful Kommunity of artists (students and Fakulty) that Sketchbook Skool came to be. They are so supportive amongst each other, super creative and just an awesome bunch of inspiring people from all over the world! And what amazes me that it is both already and only 2 years ago we started this. Time is relative, I guess. And you know what happens with it, when you’re having fun. And that is just what Sketchbook Skool is all about: fun.
That’s why a brand new Kourse is starting on April 15. It’s called ‘Polishing’ and it has 6 amazing and inspiring teachers in it, who will show a wide variety of making art, keeping a sketchbook and an art habit. Don’t miss out! Sign up now by clicking here!

The post Cake, anyone? appeared first on Make Awesome Art.

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Welcome to Draw Tip Tuesday!

Today’s draw tip isn’t mine, and it’s also a bit different from what you may be used to.
By popular demand, here is the video I made for Sketchbook Skool with my dad showing his fabulous invention: the Watercolor Watch!

To make your own watercolor watch, here’s the manual my dad made for you:

Don’t miss out on other great stuff happening in Sketchbook Skool: sign up for a Kourse over at www.sketchbookskool.com

The post Watercolor Watch: Draw Tip Tuesday appeared first on Make Awesome Art.

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As I am getting back into working mode after 12 beautiful days in Thailand (of which I will share all my drawings here soon, promise!), along wit the Sketchbook Skool team I am getting everything ready for the launch of the brand new Sketchbook Skool Kourse called ‘Expressing’.

I am so excited about this new Kourse, and about all the amazing artist’s who teach in it! One of them is Felix Scheinberger. His watercolour sketches are so juicy, it makes you want to whip out your watercolours and start creating colourful sketchbook pages. He’s a master at watercolours, and although many people find watercolouring tricky, he manages to talk you through the essence of it in this short video I made with him this summer when I visited him in Berlin. At the end of the video, he tells you to burn your painting! Really? Yes. Well, just a little.

Felix has a lot of other tricks up his sleeve and you can learn them all in Sketchbook Skool. Klass starts this Friday! Don’t miss out, click here to sign up now!

The post Burn your painting! appeared first on Make Awesome Art.

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Happy New Year!

Today is the day a brand new year has started. To reset, or to go on with all the good stuff you were already doing.
Any new year’s resolutions you made, are starting now. And it’s all so exciting!

I don’t really ‘do’ new year’s resolutions – I like a little shorter term goals. But if I would share any of those goals, they would be: keep on going to find the right balance between work life and private life, teach a live workshop in spring, make the best use of my new studio, and above all: keep doing what I love most: make art and share the inspiration.

Today is also the day our brand new kourse is available in Sketchbook Skool!
The new kourse we are launching today is called “Expressing”. It’s about using your sketchbook pages to document memories, stories, experiences, feelings and emotions.
Often, a picture can say so much more than words.
In Sketchbook Skool, everyone gets to hang out with inspiring artists from all over the world. When you take a 6-week Sketchbook Skool Kourse, each week an new artist shows you his/her approach to sketchbook keeping. That means you get 6 different teachers in 6 weeks!

Every Friday a new klass is released, featuring a new Sketchbook Skool Fakulty Member. You’ll get to watch a bunch of videos in which you get a peek over the artist’s shoulder in their demos and sketchbook tours, they talk about art tools and styles, so you can learn some new techniques, or find out about art materials. Your fingers will start to itch and want to grab a pen and draw! Plus you’re not doing this alone: you get to do your homework along with all your klass mates, and if you upload your work on the kourse website you all get to see what you’re making and I can tell you: the Sketchbook Skool Kommunity is like a huge cheerleader team and an inspiring creative group of people from all over the world!

Since Danny and I partnered up to start Sketchbook Skool, we get to meet fantastic artists from around the world, learn so much from them and share it all in Sketchbook Skool.

With the new kourse called “Expressing”, these fabulous artists are joining Sketchbook Skool’s Fakulty:

Felix Scheinberger
I am such a big fan of Felix’s work! The pages of his book ‘Urban Watercoloring’ look so juicy, it always makes me want to start splashing around with paint. But also his book ‘Mut zum Skizzenbuch’ (meaning Courage For The Sketchbook), which for some mysterious reason hasn’t been published in an English version (yet), is so inspiring to try different techniques and styles. I can’t even begin to explain how happy I was to spend time with him in Berlin to film his klass!

Jill Weber
Danny introduced me to Jill’s work, and I fell in love with her art right away. Jill is an artist as well as a book designer and illustrator. She lives with her husband on a farm called Frajil Farms and also blogs about this magical place. Her colourful paintings and illustrations each seem to be individual stories full of imagination. And her sketchbooks! Wait until you see her sketchbook tour in klass!

Michael Nobbs
Michael is an inspiration for so many people. Ever since I took my first plunge into the world of blogging, I’ve been following him. He found a way to build an artistic life around the obstacles in his life. He gets things done. Like writing books, making art and mentoring and guiding people from all over the world.
Plus Michael is a wonderful person to be around. I’m sure you will agree when you watch the videos we shot in and around his cottage in Wales.

Penelope Dullaghan
She was on my list called “collaborate with some day”, long before Sketchbook Skool was born. I found out about Penelope via Illustration Friday, the community website for art that she initiated. She’s an illustrator, designer and painter and lives in a beautiful house in Indianapolis with her husband and daughter. I love her style! Colourful, Her patterns and paintings are colourful and whimsical and I can’t get enough of awing over her pattern designs.

Sabine Wisman
Another Dutchie, like me! Sabine is a writer who turned into an illustrator. She’s a real fun person to hang out with. With her husband, two sons and a dog, she lives in Haarlem, which means she’s located perfectly in between city life of Amsterdam and beach life at the North Sea. Her work is whimsical, funny, clear and bright and she sure knows how to add a storytelling element to her drawings in a straightforward way.
Another fun fact: Sabine is also a student in Sketchbook Skool!

My humble self
I am honored to be joining this awesome group of teachers this term in Sketchbook Skool! My klass will be about hand lettering, and using it to make your sketchbook an even richer document of your life. Even when you think your handwriting sucks, you can add text to your pages without the fear you will ‘ruin’ your drawing. I can’t wait to get started!

It took us a while to straighten things out and to work our way towards the future of Sketchbook Skool. Finally, the new Kourse is available NOW, and the first klass begins on Jan 15. Click here to sign up now!

I am pretty sure that being creative is a new year’s resolution you will want to keep – and in Sketchbook Skool we can help you with it. Go to www.sketchbookskool.com and join us!

The post 2016! Happy New Year! appeared first on Make Awesome Art.

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I was going to write a blog post here, to update you about what’s coming up in 2016, in Sketchbook Skool. But I’ve got something better. Danny and I made a superfun holiday-themed video that says it all:

 

Sketchbook Skool is all about the Creative Community of both students and teachers- more than 10.000 people joined. Supporting each other, inspiring and nurturing each other’s art habits.
In 2016 we will offer new kourses, but also a lot of free stuff like ebooks, webinars, sketch challenges, artist interviews and videos, online and offline events and much more.

The post A Christmas Karol! appeared first on Make Awesome Art.

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I am so excited about the new Sketchbook Skool Kourse, which will launch early 2016. One of the new Fakulty members is illustrator, water colourist, art teacher, and wonderful artist Felix Scheinberger, and I was lucky enough to visit him in Berlin this summer to film his Klass for Sketchbook Skool. Here’s a little video I made when we went outside for a stroll and some filming.

The post How it feels to be portrayed appeared first on Make Awesome Art.

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Last weekend I was in Wales. What a beautiful country! Not that I've been sightseeing but I did have a peek out of the window in the train and in the car. I stayed in Aberysthwyth - a town I know from the fictional detective show 'Hinterland' - but it'll stay a bit of a mystery to me because I saw most of it when it was dark.
So why did I go there? To hang out with the wonderful, creative and inspiring artist Michael Nobbs, who I am very happy to announce is a new member of our Sketchbook Skool Fakulty. Together with cameraman Brian, we filmed Michael's Sketchbook Skool klass, in and around his studio. Here's a little behind-the-scenes video:


Michael recorded a three-minute podcast on the day of filming - if you want to listen to it, click here.
Find out more about Michael by following this link
And here's a link to Brian's website.

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The past week I Spent in New York City. The reason to be there was Sketchbook Skool. Danny and I worked on a lot of planning and thinking about how to make Sketchbook Skool an even better and unique experience for everyone joining the community. We had great conversations, insights and aha-moments and made a lot of decisions that will be beneficial for the Skool, the students, the teachers, our team, and for us. And we had fun during our summit.

Here's a little visual recap of my days in NYC - and a fun video too!

Drawing is such a fantastic way to kill time when traveling!

I didn't get anything from this food truck but enjoyed drawing it from the other side of the street.

I got cold after sitting on a concrete bench during the food truck drawing so warmed up with a perfect double machiato - and a drawing of the espresso machine!

We had brunch with part of the Sketchbook Skool Fakulty, awed over each other's sketchbook pages, and drank Cava to celebrate creativity. From left to right: Danny Gregory, Melanie Reim, Veronica Lawlor, France Belleville, Vinh Ganapathy, Jonathan Twingley, me.

We met with a group of Sketchbook Skool students in Washington Square Park. This is a quick sketch of people waiting in line for crepes in the park.

A relaxing drawing, done after a long, productive day full of interesting meetings and discussions

Jetlag! I took advantage of being awake way too early, by making a drawing

Some random drawings done before leaving again

Danny is not only my business partner, he is great to hang out with, has an endless stream of creative ideas popping up in his mind, and he makes awesome art. He also is a great host and he showed me around in his neighbourhood, where we picked a place to sit down and do a drawing together. It was so much fun to do and I really like the drawing we made.
This is the video we shot while we made the drawing:


Wanna know more about Sketchbook Skool? Go to sketchbookskool.com and join the creative community!

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This week I had a conversation over email with a student of mine. She has participated in several of my online classes as well as in Sketchbook Skool. 

She gave me valuable feedback about her experiences in the Sketchbook Skool Kourse 'Playing that ran in July.

A little explanation: The lessons in the Playing series (the 4-week kourse ''More Playing" just started this Monday - you can still join by clicking here if you want) have been quite different from our previous kourses in Sketchbook Skool. Before, in Sketchbook Skool we have offered 6-week kourses, in which we feature 6 different teachers and give an insight on their approaches to making art and a peek in their studios. After summer, all of these awesome kourses will still be available on www.sketchbookskool.com for anyone who wants to start or keep a creative habit.  

So anyway, in this email conversation she asked me about 'the future' of Sketchbook Skool. Since I've been asked this more often in the past weeks, I thought I'd share my thoughts about this on my blog as well:
 
The playing series is definitely NOT the last thing we produced in SBS. We are planning great things for January. Planning for the new year rather than for autumn,  will give Danny and me space and time to work on other projects too.We are still not exactly sure where we'll go with SBS, and in a business-sense that may not be smart, but if we look at SBS as an art project, it does make sense. We may try other things and get plenty new ideas that we could share via SBS at some point.

I believe that the initial idea of sharing all kinds of different approaches in one class, by different teachers from around the world is what makes SBS so unique, but that doesn't mean we should do only that. After all, we are artists and we like to experiment and develop and learn new things. Also, producing a Kourse each semester is not doable with a small team like ours and that's okay, especially since we want to keep making art ourselves and take up projects for ourselves. And the wonderful thing is that now we know for a fact that we have a very loyal Kommunity that will understand and forgive us for trying to find the right balance.
 
To finish this post visually: here's a little drawing I made a while ago.
 

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About once a week I bring my fountain pens to the kitchen tape for refilling. My reason for making this rather quick, benign chore a public affair is to take advantage of the great parenting truism: If you do it, they will copy. Huck isn’t the kind of kid who would be too keen on formal handwriting practice (does that kind of kid even exist?), but if I get busy with some nifty writing utensil, he’s at my side in a flash, begging for a turn.

Fountain pens are awesome enough, but dip pens? There’s nothing better. A bottle of ink, a nib with just the right amount of skritch…there’s a happy kid. I didn’t suggest the alphabet practice; he filled up the page as he chose.

That’s my beloved metal brush pen he’s holding, the $1.49 treasure acquired during my surprise trip to the art supply store on Mother’s Day. (The plastic Speedball pen holder was another buck fifty. We live large.)

(That’s an Amazon link to show you what it looks like, but as you can see, you’re much better off buying local for this one. That’s some markup, eh?)

I tumbled to the metal brush pen (aka my new best friend) in Jonathan Twingley’s rather amazing class at Sketchbook Skool. It was swoon at first site. You get a broad line from the flat nib, or you can turn it on its side for a fine line. It’s on the messy side—likes to spatter ink if you change direction midstroke—but for me that’s part of the appeal. I use it when I’m in the mood for rough, bold lines and a bit of ink spray. Jonathan Twingley likes to fill pages and pages with large drawings and then cut out selected images and collage them together into a new piece of art—really quite magical to behold him at work.

And this post offers a quite detailed look at what a steel brush nib can do.

We also have a pair of glass dip pens that my parents gave me years ago with more typical pointed nibs. You can see Huck’s page of orange squiggles on the table. I know somewhere in my archives I’ve talked about the magical powers of colored chalk and a little slate, or a whiteboard and dry erase markers, for transforming otherwise dull writing into fun. Dip pens are the same principle times a hundred.

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