Hour by Hour
After all the hustle and bustle and merriment of Christmas comes a bit of quiet– which always feels just right. Tips and Techniques– Yesterday, I captured some of my final holiday preparations using a challenge I call “Hour by Hour.” The goal is to sketch something every hour of the day, but each sketch should take no more than three to five minutes. The time limit makes it doable, and although some of the sketches seem random in the moment, the end result really conveys a sense of the day. I sketched… Read More
Hour by Hour
How do you capture a day? In hours? In moments? The premise of the Hour by Hour sketch challenge is to put pen to paper every hour of a single day on one journal page, with no sketch taking more than five minutes. I introduced this challenge during a week of teaching at the Hog Island Audubon Camp, where the days are busy and intense. The challenge forces you to work fast and loose, while helping you capture small things that together convey a sense of the day. It’s a good challenge… Read More
Sketcher’s Tea 2017
I recently hosted a Sketcher’s Tea—an excuse, really, for sketchers to come out of isolation in March and share a cup of tea and an afternoon of painting together. Sketching tea cups seems straightforward enough. And yet, there are lessons to be learned each time I do it. Perspective, shadows, painting whites, lost edges, reflections, patterns…the art of mastering the simple and the complex is what makes sketching tea cups both challenging and fun. Tips and Techniques– I often start by making a small value sketch so that I know where the… Read More
#OneWeek100People: 50-100
Obsessive, distracting, challenging, fun. Sketching 100 people in a week has been a crazy ride. Instead of eyeing the artistic properties of carrots and beets in the supermarket, I found myself wishing I could draw the man with the waist-length gray beard or the woman in the colorful scarf. I became a spy in the coffee shop and at the library: casing the joints for subjects, finding seats where I could be unobtrusive, stealing glances, occasionally getting caught. I’ve learned a lot in a week. The more you do, the better you… Read More
Fall Fruits
I went on a “sketch crawl” at the Connecticut College Arboretum last weekend expecting to draw trees. Instead, the “crawl” felt more like a race, as we were given 15 minutes to draw in a particular location before moving to the next site. Between hiking, settling in and packing up, there was precious little time for more than a very loose sketch and a hasty wash of color at each location. It was a good exercise, but I quickly abandoned the idea of doing a detailed tree study in favor of focusing on… Read More
Fast Takes
It can be hard to find the time for art when life gets busy. A whole painting or even an entire journal page can seem impossible to undertake. So I made a grid on these pages in the hope that I would be able to fill smaller spaces over the course of several days. As it turned out, I drew the entire two-page spread during an hour-long hike, pausing every so often to do a quick sketch when something caught my eye. Done directly in pen, each sketch took no more than… Read More
Hour by Hour
What if you had to draw something every hour all day, but each drawing could take only one to five minutes? That’s the challenge I issued to participants at a recent workshop on Arts and Birding in Maine…and this page is my own result. Starting at 5:40am with the clothes hanging in my closet, I found that sometimes I knew what I wanted to draw (the osprey nest), but more often, I just stopped at some point during each hour and drew whatever was in front of me (flowers on the breakfast… Read More
Jean Mackay
Inspire curiosity!
Podcast: The Art of Discovery with Jean Mackay
Drawn In 