Alpenglow without mountains?

One of my favorite phenomena to paint is alpenglow: when the peaks of mountains turn dazzling warm golds, corals, and pinks at sunrise or sunset. Typically snow turns pink or gold, while rock-browns turn vibrant burnt orange. I like this phenomenon so much I took a class in it with Claire Giordano. I don’t live … Read more

Nature Notebook: Snow!

Snow is fun to paint and, for me at least, it happens rarely enough that I often forget the details of what it looks like an how to capture it. So let’s use photos to observe what it looks like, and think about how to paint it.

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An Artist’s Guide to Sunrise & Sunset

This month’s Landscape Art Club theme is Sunsets, which works for me: I love sunsets! Painted by Natalia has a great feature this month on sunset technique with lots of reference photos, and looking through them got me thinking about the science of sunsets – and for that matter, sunrises! Why are they the way they are? And can that knowledge help to paint them better? I had fun learning about the moon for my Artist’s Guide to the Moon, so I thought I’d put together some info on sunsets.

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An Artist’s Guide to the Moon

In my Nature Notebook series, I take a look at natural phenomena and try to explore the science & nature facts behind them in order to improve the accuracy of my paintings. I am not a realistic painter by any means, but still, I feel like a grounding in natural reality is helpful even for … Read more

Nature Notebook: Shrubs of the Northeast

I recently took a class called Native New England Shrubs at Native Plant Trust, and as part of the class we were assigned to find certain shrubs in our area and make guidebook pages for them, including dried leaves or other plant material (if we found any) and any original images or writing designed to … Read more

Nature Notebook: Pine

Eastern White Pine (Pinus strobus): Sketches of tree shapes, pine cone, bundle of needles

Pine is the classic conifer, and where I live, the mighty towering Easter White Pine is king!

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Nature Notebook: Elm

Welcome to a new feature here on the blog! In an effort to learn how to paint trees, as well as to learn more about them, I’m going to do a series of tree profiles, where I attempt to paint a tree, and provide fun facts and identification tips about that family of tree. I also love taking pictures of trees, so I have a large back catalogue of tree photos in on my phone which I can use to help illustrate the points.

I’m keeping the title general (“Nature Notebook”) to allow me to explore other plant or animal species as I see fit!

My first tree is Elm!

American Elm (Ulmus Americana): Winter silhouette, summer silhouette, leaf detail

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