City Walk
Discover the art of truly seeing before you paint. This course guides you through analyzing outdoor scenes — light direction, composition, and atmosphere — and translating their essence onto paper. Learn how to simplify complex views, capture fleeting impressions, and express the spirit of a place with freshness and confidence.
City Walk — Plein Air Sketching & Watercolor
Discover the art of truly seeing before you paint. Artist Lei Li will guide you through analyzing outdoor scenes — light direction, composition, and atmosphere — and translating their essence onto paper. Learn how to simplify complex views, capture fleeting impressions, and express the spirit of a place with freshness and confidence.
Lesson 4: City Walk Under Golden Trees in watercolor + bonus in Ink & Wash
-
Use light, shadow, and warm–cool color contrast to convey depth, atmosphere, and a quiet winter mood in the city
-
Simplify the intricate layers of tree lines
Lesson 5: Cozy Corner
(watercolor)
-
Generalized approach to depicting vegetation
-
Creating indoor light and shadow ambiance
Lesson 6:Crowd by the sea (watercolor)
-
Handling spatial relationships between solid and void
-
Simplifying complex distant scenes
-
Treating figures spatially to emphasize rhythm
-
Techniques for rendering gray tones
Lesson 7:Ginkgo Trees in a Courtyard (Watercolor)
-
Expressing autumn light and shadow ambiance
-
Sketchy rendering of trees
Lesson 8: Urban Depth at Dusk (ink & Wash)
-
Simplify dense urban details into clear structural layers with depth
-
Capture warm evening light and shadow to convey mood and spatial compression
Lesson 9: Snow in an Alley- Student’s Challenge (Bonus)
-
Conveying the atmosphere of a snowy landscape
-
Techniques for rendering snowflakes
-
Handling the interplay of sharp focus and soft blur in the composition
Jan 27