Review: Travel Sketching in Mixed Media by Marc Taro Holmes (Craftsy)

Travel Sketching in Mixed Media is Marc Taro Holmes' second art course on Craftsy. The first was Sketching People in Motion which I've featured a few months ago.

This new course from Marc covers travel sketching, a topic that should appeal to those who are into urban sketching or drawing on location. As I like drawing outdoors, I enjoyed this course a lot.

Having said that, the first thing to note is, this is a classroom course. Marc doesn't actually go outdoors in the course but teaches from inside the classroom using examples of sketches and paintings he has created outdoors, and photos as reference when it comes to tackling the subject matter.

This 166-minute course is split into 7 lessons, namely:

1. Single-Line Sketching - 30min
2. Draw Like a Painter - 29min
3. Tinting Drawings in Watercolor - 27min
4. Sketch Collecting - 20min
5. Painless Perspective - 23min
6. Watercolor Sketching - 21min
7. Working in Layers - 16min

The seven lessons are geared towards giving you the techniques and mentality to tackle drawing outdoors, such as a cityscape, landscape or any subject that catches your eye on the street.

The tools you'll need would be pen, ink and watercolour. The first lesson teaches you how to use ink line drawings to capture the essence of a scene, in this case a lighthouse by a field. The latter lessons goes into how you can use colour to enhance your drawings. In addition to using watercolour, Marc also shows you how you can quickly colour your sketches using ink pens that are watersoluble. The effect is quite nice.

Last two lessons are on watercolour sketching without the help of lines.

The guided instructions together with demonstrations make it easy to follow along. And if you have any questions, you can ask Marc directly.

Sketching on location has its own challenges, and I think Marc did a good job highlighting them in his course.

Everyone should try outdoor sketching regardless of whether you are enrolled in this course or not. If you have no experience or find it daunting, then this course should get you warmed up in no time.

This is a fun course and sketching outdoors is fun. Try it.

You can check out more reviews on the course page below.

Disclosure: This course was provided to me by Craftsy for review purposes. You can support Parka Blogs by using the affiliate links as I get a little commission from each sale. :-)