I’m now back home after my epic 9-week trip to Europe and I’ve been thinking a lot about how to share my adventures and my 8 sketchbooks!

This trip I focused on creating video content for my Sketching Adventure Community on Patreon as it was the best way to document my work, thoughts and goals during my travels. But I also want to share my trip here on my blog as well!

I’d love to create a full written account of my adventures and sketches but the time needed to that means that it’s just not possible. However, I plan to do a series of posts over the coming weeks sharing the highlights and I hope that you’ll enjoy that.

But even putting highlights together is a mammoth task and I realised that an update from my first week in Germany had to be split into a number of articles as we did so much! So please be patient with me as I go through 100s of photos and a full sketchbook each week to give you an overview of my amazing trip. If you want to see every sketch, and hear me discuss why I approached each sketch the way that I did – I’ve been doing that in livestreams inside my Sketching Adventure Community on Patreon.

But today, I want to share details of two incredible workshops I taught in Germany…

Teaching in Germany

After four weeks in Scotland (see here and here) I had one week in the Heidelberg region of Germany where I taught two one-day workshops – one in Ladenburg and one in Heidelberg.

In this article I’m going to share details of these workshops and then I’ll share my sketches from the rest of the week – including my prep-days, two sketchwalks with USK Mannheim and other sketching adventures. Huge thanks to Kerstin from USK Mannheim for making this whole visit possible!

Both workshops were focused on sketching with shapes and we had gorgeous locations. I will mix the work and photos from both workshops together.

  
We spent the morning doing shape exercises – big shapes, negative shapes and shadow shapes – using watercolour pencils or markers.

And we finished the morning session with a watercolour sketch starting with shapes.

In Heidelberg I actually managed a sketch during lunch!

I don’t think I have ever done this before on a workshop day!

And then in the afternoon we did a few shape thumbnails before tackling a bigger sketch. 

Here I am mid-demo in Heidelberg.

I did three different sketches of the main square in Ladenburg – here is the third version.

I also gave a mini-demo (in Ladenburg) on how to draw timber-framed houses using principles from my Buildings course (BTW I’m hosting a Live Version of my Buildings course starting next month – more details coming soon!)

Here are photos of the throwdowns from both workshops…

Amazing work by everyone!

In the last 20 minutes of each workshop we reviewed everyone’s sketch so that we ended the day brimming with new ideas to try in our own work! I really love doing these sessions at the end of the workshop!

Thanks to everyone who was part of two very special days!

I absolutely loved sketching with you and I was blown away by all your work. Well done!

And finally…
Did I do any sketching at the end of the day? Yes!
After the Ladenburg workshop I sketched some of K’s son’s Pokemon and after the Heidelberg workshop I sketched our early dinner!

What a wonderful two days!