Today we officially finished the Re-run of SketchingNow Foundations and it’s been an amazing experience for me. Rather than just going through the course and writing Foundations articles which I have done twice before, this year I added heaps of bonus material (videos!) into the classroom. In the end I filmed more than 4.5 hours of additional content over the 12 lessons, showing more advanced applications of the Foundations concepts. I’ve since realised that it’s almost like a separate course – Foundations 2.0 – added into the classroom for free! But I’m super happy to be updating and adding to my original Foundations course so that it becomes a more useful resource for people to come back to over and over again. And I love reading feedback like this: I went through it last year and it’s been so instructive to do it again and with a group. I’ve picked up so much more the second time.

I know I mention this often, but I’m even more convinced that the best way to improve your work and in particular the speed at which you sketch, is to revisit core concepts and techniques, and improve your visual thinking! This enables you to make quicker assessments of your scene leading to looser and faster sketching. I really feel as if it has helped my work a lot this year and it’s great training for my big trip coming up soon.

I finished the Re-run by filming nearly one hour of new reviews from recent work posted into the classroom. And as I reviewed a number of Lesson 11 Cafe sketches, decided to add a mini lesson on what to look out for when sketching inside busy cafes.

These two one page markups give an idea of what I talk about in the classroom – so if you have enrolled in Foundations, please go and check it out in part 12.06. It might be useful as you prepare for the Oneweek100people challenge next week.

It’s been so great to see a lovely supportive group go through the course together! It’s so much better when you learn with others and this is the main reason why I organised the Re-run. So a huge thankyou to everyone who took the time to interact inside the classroom and encourage/inspire each other. It’s been so wonderful to watch!

So… I’ve organised another Group Run-through for the Edges – which follows on from Foundations and will be an important preparation for Watercolour On Location. I’ll be sharing more about the course next week, but in the meantime, please click here for more information about Edges.

Did you go through Foundations again this year? How did you go? Are you joining the Edges Run-through?