nature drawing
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Sketching at the lake
A sketch from a peaceful, clear morning by the lake.
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Race weekend 4
Another race weekend, with another good batch of lessons learned about watercolor gouache painting. I’ve abandoned my pencil in favor of underpainting, which is allowing me more flexibility with shapes, as well as more speed. The yellow of my underpainting shows through on the clouds here, but I kind of like the effect. I didn’t…
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Race weekend 2
Another race weekend, another chance to practice watercolor gouache for a few hours 🙂 From my paddock spot, I couldn’t see much other than trees. But it was a good opportunity for practicing green color-mixing. I picked a couple trees with subtle hue differences, and I practiced pushing their hues further from each other, to…
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Free coloring pages
Please enjoy these free printable coloring pages 🙂 If you’re willing, please share your finished colorings with me at mail.steph.inks@gmail.com; I’d love to see what you come up with!
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View from the watch tower
We spent a night in a nearby city and I found a few opportunities to sketch outside. First, a beautiful vista from the top of a fire watch tower. It was very windy up there, so I rushed to scribble out a memory before I lost my sketchbook or my hat. And later, sitting in…
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Chickadee in a cherry tree
For my future mother-in-law’s birthday this year, I wanted to give her a memento that would suit the colors of her newly decorated home office. For a pink-and-white theme, of course I’ll choose cherry blossoms! There were many, many iterations of composition before I landed on one that felt right. My fiancé helped break me…
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Half-dome
An ink illustration of Yosemite’s Half-Dome, completed for my sister on her birthday. I’m having lots of fun with grayscale ink-washes lately. This sketch of a local bookstore was almost a practice run for inking Half-Dome. Returning to my ink pot and dip pens was also a refreshing change of pace after many recent outings…
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View from an afternoon hike
Every time I walk this trail, I’m enamored by the sudden appearance of the blue ridge in the distance when the trail breaks onto this field. And every time I’m disappointed by the inability of a phone camera to capture anywhere near the beauty of the scene. This time I tried to capture it with…
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Tree-lined country road
One of my first plein-air paintings, in pallet watercolors on Arches hot-pressed watercolor paper. A windy day made this on-site painting a struggle.
