As far as painting goes, copying is not stealing. It's not forgery (unless you have that intention combined with extraordinary skills that go well beyond painting). Anyway, I work with and teach watercolor and while nothing is impossible, it's damn near impossible to forge or copy a watercolor exactly. That's not the point.

Painters have been copying other painters' work for ages. In fact, I have occasionally wondered whether the Lascaux caves were originally an art school of sorts. Constable copied Van Ruisdael. So did J. C. Dahl. Degas copied Delacroix. So did van Gogh, along with Millet and Gaugin. Hockney copied van Gogh. And then there's Kehinde Wiley. I could write lists and lists of examples.

My 2002 watercolor above was the first copy I ever made of an historic painting. Why not start with Vermeer? I learned an enormous amount about how far I could push color and how (and how not to) make and scale a copy by using a grid. As I tend to throw myself into things head first and then learn through an experiential process, it took me a while, too late, to realize that I'd screwed up the grid proportions which threw everything out of whack and hence the wonky result. But that's something I've paid attention to closely since and am able to warn my students about now. So, rather than Girl with A Pearl Earring, I call it The Understudy.

In reference to literature, Boris Pasternak once said that "Translation is very much like copying paintings." I think that's true.

When we copy paintings, we become acquainted with the painter at a depth almost beyond language. We learn about composition, color, value, but also how the painter made that stroke. (How did she make that?) We have to push ourselves and our technical abilities and learn to think and make decisions in motion because with watercolor, the element of time is critical. It's exciting and demanding.

Because we're not forging and usually still learning (that never stops), the eventual result is a piece that is very much our own. In making a copy, the copier's experience, stylistic tendencies, process and commitment are thrown into high relief.

“If you fail in copying from a master you succeed in birthing an original art." 
—Kushal Poddar

Copying oils and pastels in watercolor is challenging but copying a watercolor is an absolute rush. I am extremely proud of some of my watercolor copies including my Dürer Young Hare. I recently almost passed out while copying a Morisot watercolor.

I love teaching watercolor using the method of copying. Not only can we learn everything that I've described above and more but we learn about the lives and work of artists and cultural history. I've also found it to be, potentially, one of the quickest ways to move beyond the beginner phase.

I'm teaching two small online master classes this summer. They are not for beginners but you don't have to be advanced either. You only have to understand the basic principles of watercolor, color and drawing. I want to offer a quick remedial lesson or three for the interested but insecure. I haven't quite worked out how I'll present that but expect to do so any day now. I have a list of people to notify  when I open for summer registration.

If you'd like to be notified, please sign up here or email me here with questions.

"When you have practiced drawing for a while... take pains and pleasure in constantly copying the best works that you can find done by the hand of great masters."      —Cennino Cennini

I used another image by Cory Richards' portfolio of Franz Josef Land for these Arctic Terns.

I'm happy with the way this one turned out.

I can't stand rooting through scraps of paper in search of a subject to draw and watercolor. I have enough pieces of paper all over my studio and office.  They drive me crazy. No matter how many times I straighten up, the pieces of paper pile up and so I have to surrender at least somewhat.

About a year ago, I acquired a large stack of relatively recent National Geographics via Freecycle. These bound pages offer a much more orderly reference than miscellaneous scraps. Plus, I learn things.

For example, the reference photo of this Polar Bear comes from an article about Franz Josef Land. I'd heard of Franz Josef Land but was not sure where, exactly it was or that it is part of Russia.

My reference photo for this entry is by Cory Richards and the caption reads, "Polar bears eat mainly ringed seals and bearded seals, captured on sea ice. On land they scrounge seabirds, eggs, even grass. This animal grazed for days below Rubini Rock—then chewed up the remote camera."

So that I am not at a loss as to what to draw and paint when I sit down to this new sketchbook, I've been going through scraps of images I've cut out of magazines over the past year for just this very reason. Not many still hold their appeal but this one felt seasonal and doable so here it is, a branch with apples.

I turned around the other morning and spotted one of these darling Red Efts on my screen. Naturally, I had to go meet the thing and look it over, up close and personal. Yes, I picked it up and held it in my hand.

When I was a child at camp in the Catskills, we would catch these what we called Salamanders in the woods and probably took them back to our tents for pets. Then, I had no idea but just learned that this is not a Salamander at all but a juvenile Eastern Newt who spent its larva stage in the water, lives on land while a bright orange juvie and then returns to the water as an adult. These creatures live for 12 - 15 years! Amazing!

I had to commemorate this only find of my adult life in an illustration. I am so impressed and delighted that once again, so many, many years later, I am living in the vicinity of the Eastern Newt and that one came to visit.

Sometimes things just line up nicely.

I had a new neighbor over for tea today on what happens to be my birthday. Although she was unaware that it is my birthday, she brought flowers and, what do you know? It's her daughter's birthday, too.

I've been threatening to start a studio journal, just for fun. Just to keep my drawing and painting in regular action while I work on landscapes and commissions. So I took this opportunity to use the flowers as models to get me started. Nothing too special. No need for perfection.

Starting a new journal or book or painting or new composition of any sort usually seems daunting as the blank pages loom ahead. But here I've made a start and sometimes that is the most important thing. Just to dirty up the first page a little.

The next most important thing, of course, is to start filling the pages and then, ideally to finish something. I like the idea of a studio journal to fill for fun without worrying about the outcome. This Stillman & Birn hardcover Beta book is perfect. Excellent quality paper and something I've been saving for the perfect project.

I'll post images from this sketchbook a couple of times a month for the foreseeable future. Let's see what develops.

I've started in on a fresh series of landscapes. The best way to start this sort of adventure is by looking. The best way to see what you are looking at is by drawing. And the best way to study is by looking at what others who've gone before have made.

So, I'm happy to be back to the drawing board at the very beginning of something I've been working at for many, many years. Keeping a beginner's mind is a helpful way to approach almost anything.

This summer, I'm offering an online foundation course in drawing and watercolor for absolute beginners and for anyone willing to assume a beginner's mind. Need a helping hand to start or get back to your own practice? Join us!

Stay tuned for more drawings.

There are so many distractions throughout the course of any normal day. Squirrel! The 62,000ish thoughts that we think each day! Things To Do! War! Anything and everything associated with our smart phones.

One of my most favorite scenes in Western Lit is when Will Farnaby comes to after being shipwrecked on Aldous Huxley's Island. As Will regains consciousness, he hears voices calling "Attention! Attention!" "Here and now, boys, here and now.", shortly discovering that the voices are trained mynah birds freed by an old rajah to remind the Island dwellers to stay present and pay attention.

One of the major reasons that I draw and teach drawing is that it helps me, and others, to practice being present.

You may remember an amusing Harvard study from a couple of decades back describing Inattentional Blindness. In a nutshell, this phenomenon describes what happens when we are so distracted by our thoughts that we miss out on obviously noticeable facts presented before our very eyes and was identified years before Blackberries hit the market.

Even though I've read, watched and listened to almost all of the explanations and warnings of what smart phones do to our brains and experience, I have become addicted and distracted by the damned things, too. I am taking slow steps to address this because I hate how difficult it has become for me to read a book and to contend with a brain that behaves increasingly like a flea.

This is especially annoying after having read and taken to heart works  from Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, to Jaron Lanier's 10 Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, to Tristan Harris in The Social Dilemma, and so much more.

I was one of the last people I know to have purchased a smart phone. I put in a considerable amount of time at the MIT Media Lab, was an early blogger, and have taught online since 2011 so, obviously, I'm not a Luddite. I just found cell phone behavior to be highly annoying and the idea of carrying around a distracting device that removed people from their live environment and connections to be outright ignorant.

Then one day, I got lost. I was driving to a friend's new farm in the country, took a long wrong turn and had no idea where I was or how to find my way. The only place I could spot to pull over for directions was a dilapidated, rusting trailer at the end of a rutted, muddy drive. I did pull onto that property and was spared knocking on the door because the person living there came out to ask what I wanted. Directions. Directions that he did not know and could not give.

That's the moment I finally decided to buy an iPhone and I had one within the week. I wanted it for the GPS and emergencies. It's been a blessing and a curse and, frankly, a lot of little fun along the way. I love it. I hate it. And like any addiction, I want to use it, I don't want it to use me.

If you are suffering attention issues because, perhaps, of your smart phone, I highly recommend that you listen to Ezra Klein's interview with Johann Hari, the author of Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention - and How to Think Deeply Again.

The podcast interview is interesting and enlightening but I've got the audiobook queued up to listen to next. Here's the New York Times review of the book from early this month. That's worth a read if you're on the fence.

I'm going for a walk now to see what I can pay attention to in the woods. Then I'm going to sit down to do a daily drawing, right after I check my phone.

While preparing for my upcoming membership course, I dipped into one of my most favorite books on drawing. I am so fond of this artist author and his teaching that I'm reprinting a post I published about him in 2010, from my Drawing America work. Enjoy!

Eric Sloane
1905 – 1985

"As far back as the early 1700s, many American artists began their careers as sign painters and I can see why. The pleasure of creating a piece of work necessary to the buyer is a satisfaction beyond that of the artisan who paints merely to decorate. Some of America's finest and most prized examples of folk art are antique trade signs and inn signs. The signs I painted on midwest restaurant windows, even on hotel rest room doors, probably gave me more artistic satisfaction than anything I might have accomplished in art schools. I still letter freehand as easily as I write script and still have profound reverence for classic lettering." --Eric Sloane

Sign painter, muralist, prolific author, illustrator, teacher, painter, meteorologist, Eric Sloane began life as Everard Jean Hinrichs in 1905. After his mother died, young Everard launched a string of runaway attempts until his father finally gave him the family Packard Roadster and twenty dollars. That car and twenty dollars got him as far as Ohio where he "set out on foot as an itinerant boy painter." Not much later, he'd earned enough to buy another car and broadened his prospects.

"Henry Ford had not yet invented the glove compartment, but I shared the seat of a Model T with a traveling office of paper and pencils, a dictionary, and sketching equipment." —Eric Sloane

After a stint in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, with his own sign business, he changed his name.

"When I left Lancaster to wend my way afoot toward the west, I decided to create a new nom de plume and chose the name of my teacher [John Sloan] but added an e to the name of Sloan. I knocked off the first and last two letters of American, which left eric and headed westward as Eric Sloane." —Eric Sloane

Traveling through Taos, New Mexico, not much later, Sloane discovered his true purpose.

"Inspired by the eight-thousand-food view of sky, I had decided to make meteorology and sky painting a life's work and, after all, the best way for me to learn a subject has always been to write a book about it." —Eric Sloane

In this process, Sloane composed one of the great American books on drawing --

Lighthearted, with humor, Sloane starts with descriptions of cloud formations, then helps the reader see and understand  our view, and the dimensions of sky before laying out fun drawing instruction.

It's a personal favorite but only one of a stack of books that Sloane wrote and illustrated on skies and meteorology. These include Skies and the Artist, Look at the Sky and Tell Me The Weather, The Weather Book, For Spacious Skies, Eric Sloane's Book of Storms.

Like John Ruskin, Eric Sloane was most interested in helping people see and understand what they were looking at. His books on drawing, skies and weather help us understand. The rest of his books help us understand the history of America through the mind and hand of an artist and craftsman.

"My research finds that the difference between the early American and the man of today is a matter of awareness. The first pioneers were awake to the dangers and simple differences of the new world's Indians, sudden storms, diseases, wild animals, severe winters, droughts and all the hardships of the great adventure. They were conscious of each moment, magnificently aware of life.

"We today are lethargic, for so many things are done for us. And so we are robbed of the joy and satisfaction of awareness. We switch on lights with no idea of the source, turn a faucet with no idea of where the water comes from. Our clothing might come from New Jersey or Taiwan and even the source of our food is of no particular concern. Few of us know why we are existing and the country with its politics has become too big and complicated for individual awareness. My life's work by writing and painting has been to reawaken the original American consciousness, that quality which created the United States and abounded in earlier days." --Eric Sloane

Visit ericsloane.com

I've been working with watercolor for a long, long time. All I ever want to do is to get better at it.

My first lesson in watercolor was around the age of five. I've been practicing ever since. Because that's what watercolor is, a practice.

I grew up in a house with some variety of watercolor hung on almost every wall. These included a calligraphed page of vellum  from a very large bible, a reproduction of the Chi-Rho from the Book of Kells, a George Biddle watercolor of a rural Cuban scene, a large, pre-Raphaelite Madonna and Child bordered with oranges, blossoms and leaves, a hunt scene in the dining room. There was a tri-fold, Chinese screen painted with birds, bamboo and flowers on black with gold leaf sides that stood in the corner of our living room. By our front door hung a series of early botanical watercolor prints. My mother would design our garden plantings with watercolor and pencil on tracing paper. I think that she must have chosen most of my first books for their watercolor illustrations and, in fact, I was named for the title character in a children’s book illustrated in watercolor and pencil by the author, Marguerite De Angeli, about a French Canadian girl who learns to draw and paint in watercolor on the Gaspé Coast.

With such beginnings, it’s no surprise that I’ve dedicated my life as a painter to the medium of watercolor.

In my early-20s, I had the fortune of studying Art History with Jim Urmston, and watercolor with Ronn Davis at Santa Monica College. One of the great things about Ronn is that he treated me like a pro from the very first day of class. Sure enough, and rather quickly, I started making photorealism portraits of, mostly, musical friends in L.A.; filmy, multi-glazed pieces with loads of pencil work. I started showing almost immediately and received my first professional commissions for these portraits in 1981.

Later, in Sarasota, FL, I turned to architectural portraits of, mostly, historic residences. Those were all made very early in the morning, plopped down on curbs in front of each building.

During my years touring as a performing songwriter, I made small vignettes of scenes in Europe, New England, and Charleston, SC, wherever I would find myself on days off. All of those paintings were made from a field kit of watercolors with a tiny brush on 4" x 6" blocks that I bought at a fabulous art supply shop in Alkmaar, Holland. The scenes of my travels were all made en plein air, as they say.

Then I moved inside and made a series of full sheet bouquets in Charlottesville, VA, The Age of Flowers. In 2006, I built a studio behind my home in Nashville, TN, where I finally let go of what I then felt was the crutch of pencil, of structure beneath my color and launched into a very long series called Landscape into Art, which coincided with my watercolor blogging in those magical early days of blogging. Interestingly, as soon as I let go of relying on pencil in my own watercolor, I became obsessed with encouraging everyone to draw.

When I realized that I was not cut out for the life of incessant touring as an independent musician, I started teaching drawing and watercolor workshops as a way to, eventually, stop touring. That was 25 years ago. In the interim I taught those workshops across the country in every conceivable venue, from museums to back yards.  In 2011, I created the first in-depth, online foundation course in drawing and watercolor. By 2016, I started developing an intensive series of art history practicums that dramatically propelled beginning students onto a level of proficiency that I could never have predicted.

Everyone needs a break now and then. I took my independent sabbatical from teaching in mid-2019. Although I planned to take a year, we all know what happened at the start of 2020. So, my sabbatical was extended unexpectedly and rather dramatically. I've missed teaching because I love teaching, too.

I love introducing this living medium to new explorers, sharing all I've learned over the years, and as I am, apparently, a natural cheerleader, guiding and encouraging students along. I also love providing a solid foundation in watercolor that, alas, too many people miss. In fact, providing a solid foundation is one of the reasons I teach. Without an understanding of the basic elements and principals, people venturing into watercolor become frustrated, easily discouraged and, too often, give up.

I've been reviewing the online course material I've created over the years, and as I consider bringing these courses back, I've realized that I'd like to mix up the curriculum, combining the best of my foundation course with the watercolor history lessons, and offer the recombined content over a longer period of time rather than take my usual fire hose approach.

I'm offering this new learning opportunity to a very small group of students. It's like private lessons, but better. I'll be sending out personal invitations to those of you who've expressed interest but please, contact me if you would like to learn more, and I'll send you a full description of what I'm offering. I'd love to have you join us if it feels like a good fit.

Read about some of my students' experiences here.

I’m grateful that I was introduced to watercolor at such an early age but it doesn't matter what age you are. Watercolor is a medium and a practice that can teach us many things, no matter when we start or how long we've been practicing. I'd love to help you learn to love it, too.

Get in touch to learn more about my online membership course opening in February.