There’s a lot of studio news for April 2025. It was a very busy month.
Studio News for April 2025
CP Magic! News
The May issue of CP Magic! is a special landscape edition, featuring four round table discussions with five artists who either specialize in landscapes or who enjoy drawing landscapes, as well as other subjects.
The tutorial is a mini tutorial featuring 240 grit UArt Premium Sanded Pastel paper. The subject is distant mountains, and I show you how to draw aerial perspective and get smooth color even on this very coarse paper.
Even if you don’t care to work on textured papers, it’s an ideal project, because many of the tips work on all kinds of paper.
It’s available in digital and print formats.
Old Red Barn Tutorial
The May issue of CP Magic! wasn’t the only thing I published in April. The Old Red Barn Tutorial also published.
It’s available in two versions. The Basic tutorial is for artists interested only in the step-by-step portion and covers only the actual drawing phase. It’s a great tutorial at a great price ($14.99).
The Artist’s Journal version includes the step-by-step drawing phase, just like the Basic version. But the images are larger, and it also includes detail images of the finished drawing.
It also includes behind-the-scenes tips, comments, and suggestions, as well as how I prepared the reference photo. I also explain my review process and show you the adjustments I made after the review. At 66 pages, it’s a great value at $24.99 if you want all the nitty-gritty of my drawing process start to finish.
You can read more about the Old Red Barn Tutorial here.
Let’s Do Drama Jelly Bean Class
The first class of the year happened April 26, it sold out. Amazing!
The class stretched from 90 minutes to two hours, and covered my drawing process from the long-view perspective. I demonstrated strokes, layering, and adding details. Though preparation was a bit of a challenge, once the class began, it went smoothly. That seems to be the way of things–the waiting is worse than the doing.
Artwork
Horse Portrait
I received client approval on the finished portrait of Sego Lily Olena in March. After a delay framing the portrait, I shipped it at the end of April. That’s the first portrait completed for 2025, unless you count Pasture Patriarch. I don’t count that because I did it for myself.
Current Works in Progress
Do you remember a couple of months ago, I made a deal with myself to do business art during the week, and art for myself on Saturday? In case you don’t remember that, business art is artwork I need for classes, blog posts, the magazine, tutorials, and client work. That arrangement helped me stay motivated to work on things for myself for February and March, but broke down a little in April.
There was good reason for that, though. The last Saturday in April was class day and I spent the day involved with that in some form. All of my drawing was for the class.
The previous Saturday, other activities conspired to keep me from doing any drawing at all. Things like that happen.
But the first two Saturdays in April, I worked on Flint Hills Haze V3 (version 3). The biggest step forward for this piece was darkening the shadows in the main tree. I had been unhappy with the flatness of that tree, so I spent one day mixing Dark Indigo, Walnut Brown and Chrome Oxide Green into the shadows. The difference was remarkable.
ACEOs
I completed only two ACEOs in April, but between the portrait, Jelly Bean class, and new tutorial, I was pleased to get that many completed.
The monthly challenge for April for the members of the ACEO group was a personal challenge. Members were encouraged to try something they’d never tried before. I did two challenge pieces with mixed media. One was with watercolor, the other with gouache.
Neither one of them was 100% pleasing, but they each had good points as well as bad. You can read more about these two experiments here if you’re interested in learning more about colored pencils with mixed media.
Drawing Time for the Month
The goal for drawing time in April was 22 hours. I reached 23 hours and 9 minutes. A lot of that was due to all the drawing I had to do in preparation for the Let’s Do Drama class, but drawing is drawing.
Looking to the Future
I had a lot of fun with some of the drawing I did in April. It may surprise you to learn that the most enjoyable hours of drawing involved the demo samples I used for the Let’s Do Drama class. I had to update some of those samples from scratch.
But I also ended up with some samples that were no longer useful to the class, so I used them for experiments. I’m hoping to write a post or two about the results of those experiments.
I’m also about to begin my next new project. This one will be on Stonehenge Warm White.
Speaking of Stonehenge, I found a place that had one package of original Rising Stonehenge available. Of course, I bought it, and I’m looking forward to a side-by-side comparison between Rising and Legion Stonehenge papers. Are they really different, or is that my imagination? Stay tuned!
That’s the Studio News for April 2025
And that’s all the studio news that’s fit to print. It’s time to put my pencils away from the horse portrait project and get organized for the next project.
In the meantime, I hope you keep drawing!
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