I just came back from Finland, pushing my sketching bounderies with artist Marie Detrée (https://www.mariedetree.com/).
First I went 5 days to Helsinki to see back old friends I know from my architecture studies in Oulu 30 years ago. It was amazing to see them. (We didn’t change a lot… 😉 )
And then I went back to a natural park (Rokua) near Oulu in North of Finland to this workshop with Marie. Of course I was terribly happy to be back in Oulu after 30 years. I recognised a lot of places, feelings and smells…
But I didn’t go just to see Oulu.

I came to try new sketching techniques, and it felt good!
As it was winter, we were sketching outside at -20-25°C. Of course not a whole day outside…. we finished the sketches inside in the cottage.
The most amazing place was Poro Panuma “reindeer farm”, where Lauri and his family arranged a beautiful visit, meal and sketching opportunity for us. ( https://www.poropanuma.com/ and https://www.instagram.com/lauri.op/ )

We were sketching with color pencil and mainly with colored markers (felt tips).

In essence, learning new sketching skills with new materials you’re not used to not only improves your ability to draw but also enhances your overall creativity, by training you to see the world differently, encouraging experimentation, and providing new tools for expressing your ideas.

I was very far out of my (watercolor) comfort zone.

We trained to do line drawings in color pencil and markers, with clear lines and hatching patterns and grids in different colors overlapping each other to find new intensities in values and to explore new colour nuances.
These grids and textures add volume and light to our sketches.
We tried to render different kinds of textures with different uses of the markers. As we were 11 participants, we had 11 different world views. That’s the richness of taking a workshop: you get plenty inspiring interpretations of your surroundings. On top of having a lot of fun together !

It gave me new ways of looking at line work, values, atmospheric perspective and use of colors.

Learning again just to be in a place, to look around until you actually see, differently, and then to put that onto the paper. Put anything at all on the paper and feel my way forward. At home I am always in too much of a hurry. How about you?

Do you sometimes use colour markers?

Below you see pictures of drawings in color pencil made in the Reindeer Farm Poro Panuma and 2 leporello sketchbooks with color marker and color pencil and some pictures of the week.

There are also pictures of Marie with her sketchbooks and the last image is a wonderful leporello by Jacqueline Lebouvier.