Tag: sketch

Gift

~ stephanieabower ~ 8 Comments

I’ve been crazy busy for weeks with day job work and planning workshops for this year, so it’s high time that I posted a sketch. This was a present for my neighbor –whose house is literally magazine-ready beautiful and all decked out for the holidays–as a way to say thank you.

I quickly fell into a slow and steady pace…it took almost 3 hours for the linework and maybe an hour and a half for the color. Anyone who has taken my workshops knows that I start all my sketches with a simple rectangle, or the “Big Shape.” Here it was the rectangle at the back of the dining room. Next, I locate my vanishing point and eye level, and in three steps, I’ve got everything in place for the entire drawing. I worked in layers going left to right to minimize smearing of my 2B pencil, cleaning up, darkening and correcting lines as I go. Detail comes last. The hardest part? The shape of that table!

It was a lovely, quiet moment during the holidays in which I forgot everything else and just focused on this sketch, calming and restoring my soul.

Paris in September!

~ stephanieabower ~ Leave a comment

Breakfast in Paris? Oui! There are only a few spots open in my upcoming perspective and watercolor workshop in the dreamy City of Light, and the discount price ends in only 2 days on April 20! If you are interested, information is here.

So why a workshop in this city? I can think of no other city in the world that offers such beautiful and abundant outdoor public parks and spaces (and people use them!), amazing architecture that seems to glow, elegant fountains and glorious details, not to mention incredible food, wine, cheeses, pastries…when Brenda from Studio 56 asked where I wanted to teach, my first choice was THIS city!

Did you notice that in this sketch in the elegant Places des Vosges, the fountain appears as a stack of ellipses, with the shapes above eye level looking different from the shapes below eye level? (There is a free demo of sketching this fountain on Studio 56’s YouTube page.)

This is why I LOVE to teach perspective! I can’t think of anyone else who really explains how and WHY perspective works. Sure, you can draw from profiles and edges, but that doesn’t really tell you about WHY what you see appears the way it does. And amazingly, this is the part that is skipped in most demos!!! This is why I teach perspective, I love seeing when folks finally understand how perspective works… it’s not hard once you know what to look for.

Take a look at this sketch from Amboise…can you tell it has multiple vanishing points? I’ll explain how that works in the Paris workshop!

So join me along the Seine for a toast with french wine, bread and cheese, sketchbooks in hand at all times, for a wonderful 5+ days in one of the most beautiful cities in the world! It will be a blast, and you’ll have so many ah-ha moments! À Bientôt!