Joel and I have spent the last 3 weeks touring the Netherlands sketching, painting and sightseeing. There is a lot to see. The Dutch and Flemish Old Masters are probably some of my favourites in art history. We were fortunate to see famous paintings by Rembrandt, Vermeer and van Gogh, as well as lesser known painters (but equally amazing, in my opinion) Frans Hals, Peter Paul Rubens, Jan Brueghel, Hans Holbein and originals by illustrators Rien Poortvliet (more on this in another post), Jan Voerman Jr. and Anton Pieck. Joel and I are saturated with art history and I can honestly report: it is a good thing.

The weather was fantastic for plein air sketching and so Joel and I did a fair bit of it on this trip. We even painted a straight-up landscape, which is something we normally don’t do. I was very distracted by ducks and geese while sketching on this trip. There are tons of them because of the canals everywhere and they would often come really close and quack at you!

Most of these sketches are available as prints in my shop.