Sketching plants in colour: tricks and techniques for adding colour to your sketches.
Speaker: Anna Ribo
Date: Thursday 13 March 2025
Time: 3pm - 6pm
Once you have booked onto the event an invitation register to the Zoom meeting will be sent via email, including information on how to join the meeting along with the privacy statement.
***Please note that this event will NOT be recorded but materials will be shared with the participants after the session.
Overview
In this course, we will focus on ways of adding colour to your plant sketches. We will look at techniques and tricks for using watercolour and coloured pencils and combine these with fine-liner pens and pencils to create quick, illustrative sketches.
Adding colour can really bring life and depth to your sketches. We will look at colour choices, how to keep it simple and atmospheric perspective.
Sketching regularly, even for a short time, will quickly improve your skills. Using and thinking about colour will give you a keener eye when combining plants. You will be encouraged to experiment to find your own style and to enjoy the process rather than producing a masterpiece at each session. The aim is to give you confidence to practice.
There will be practical, quick exercises that you can repeat at home when you have a spare few minutes to improve your skills.
Sketching is a great way of quickly capturing a garden atmosphere. Being able to do a quick sketch to illustrate an idea is very useful when with clients. And observing plants, their characters and colour through sketching can help you when choosing plants and assessing a planting scheme.
The course is aimed at beginners to intermediates and anyone who would like ideas for adding colour to their sketches. It is a natural follow on to the 'Sketching plants' course.
Items to bring: Anna will discuss materials so wait with any big purchases till after the course and bring what you have got. If you wish to purchase materials, a basic selection of materials could be:
Watercolours. The 'Sennelier Aqua-Mini Artists watercolour' set is a great value starter set. You will need a blue, yellow and red, for instance French Ultramarine, Winsor Lemon, and Permanent Alarizon Crimson with Sap Green, Yellow Ochre and Payne's Grey as extras. A palette/saucers for mixing colours. Coloured pencils (blue, yellow, red, light green, dark green and a grey/indigo) preferably water soluble. Fineliner pens. Pencils (HB, 2B) and a rubber. You will need scrap paper and a few A4 sheets of smooth 160- 220 gsm paper, for instance a sketchbook. Brushes (for instance round size 2 and 4), 2 jars of water and kitchen paper.