I’m glad I took the time to journal on this trip to Italy. It does take some effort to make time to write things down each day, but it’s amazing how quickly we forget the details if we don’t record them in some way. Each day blurs into the next and you can’t rmember where […]
Category: Italy
Vernazza Sketch + GIVEAWAY
When I visited Italy in September, I only had two full days to explore the towns of Cinque Terre, but we managed to see four of the five villages, and that was without rushing around too much. We had leisurely lunches and hours of meandering, plus time spent sketching. One of my favorite experiences was […]
Manarola Harbor Sketch + GIVEAWAY!
I have a week’s worth of Italy sketches to share with you, but rather than post them all at once, I thought it might be fun to spread them out over the next seven days and give you seven chances to win some brand spankin’ new art supplies for yourself. I’ll tell you all about […]
Step-by-Step Watercolor: Olive Sketch
The olive oil from Fattoria Bacio (the estate that hosts my workshop in Italy) is the best I’ve ever tasted! During our week at the villa, the students and I sloshed it over just about everything at dinner each night: bread, pasta, salad, meat, and vegetables. And by the end of the week, we all […]
Italy Sketchbook — Travel is NOT for Sissies!
I always have such high hopes when I head off on a trip, thinking I’ll be able to share lots of great stuff with you here on my blog while I’m away, but it just doesn’t seem to work out that way. Things get very busy when I’m teaching a workshop, and there just aren’t […]
Beautiful Cinque Terre
I’m in the middle of my workshop in Tuscany at the moment, but I thought you might want to see a few more pictures from our time in Cinque Terre. Our first day had been spent hanging out in the little village of Manarola, so the second day we took off to explore the other […]
Italy – Pisa and Cinque Terre
Hello from Italy! It’s been a whirlwind week since I left Pittsburgh with seven friends, bound for Rome. The trip was grueling, but we finally landed in Rome, and after several hours of standing in security lines and customs lines, we took off for Pisa where we were picked up by a driver to take […]
Tuscany Sketches + Video!
I’ve been working on painting some of the unfinished sketches from my teaching trip to Tuscany last fall, and I’ll be sharing them with you as they’re completed. It’s getting me in the mood to go to Italy again! This page was drawn during a day trip to the tiny hilltop village of Certaldo Alto, […]
Thumbnail Sketches – All Dressed Up!
One of the lessons I taught my students while in Tuscany was about using thumbnail sketches to zero in on a scene and test out various compositional options. I suggested using a separate sketchbook page for the thumbnails and later turning that page, with its accumulation of tiny scenes, into a dynamic page in its […]
2016 Tuscany Workshop
Imagine yourself wandering through the cobblestone streets of this medieval hilltop village in Tuscany. You stop at a sidewalk cafe for a cappuccino and pull out your sketchbook to begin drawing an ancient stone building across the way. Sip…….look……..paint……..see. This is the way we experience Tuscany, taking the time to meander and explore, or to […]
