Discover the expressive possibilities of line and color in your sketches! We’ll make the most of the expressive possibilities of line and color while sketching directly on location in the beautiful coastal town and shoreline of Bar Harbor, Maine!

Line and color can each play expressive parts in your sketch, and magic happens when we let each element do what it does best! In this Sketching Workshop, we’ll explore how to bring line and color together in fresh ways—to play exciting, complementary roles in your sketches. I’m thrilled to present The Dance of Line and Color in a 5-day format, to explore and experiment with you in this stunning landscape!

The characteristics of line and color are very different, and we’ll experiment with bringing them together in an expressive dance!

The Dance will begin with line, and we’ll start by experimenting with all that a line can do, and explore a range of exciting marks that we can achieve with a variety of tools while we explore our beautiful location. This is a great way to develop confident, expressive lines, and develop your personal vocabulary of expressive marks and lines to create a lively visual story. Your lines are as individual as your handwriting—you can dramatically change expression with your variety of marks.

Color can convey not only what you see, but also what you feel. We’ll focus on what color brings to the picture, especially depth, atmosphere, and emotion. We’ll have a fun “color lab”, to practice and understand important things about color, and practice using watercolor techniques with confidence to bring impact to your sketches, and create mood with harmony and contrast.

Finally, in the Dance of Line and Color, we’ll bring the partners together with a variety of color and compositional strategies, and we’ll also practice the fine art of leaving something out for impact! That’s the beauty of a sketch—you decide just what you want to include!

Bring your curiosity, and get ready to play and experiment!

The Dance of Line and Color © is at the heart of what I have been teaching in a variety of workshops over the years. I have discovered that practicing the expressive qualities of line and color as complementary partners in a sketch is a powerful way to develop skill, confidence, and pure enjoyment in drawing and painting. I find it to be an effective approach both for landscape and urban sketching. I like to encourage the attitude of an experiment—it shifts the mindset from succeeding or failing, to focusing instead on what can be learned from the experience. I try to bring a sense of fun and experimentation—the best antidote I know for overcoming fear. If I can open the doors a bit with encouragement, it is exciting to see the growth and progress that is made, and acknowledge it! It’s my mission as a teacher to find
ways to make sketching as fulfilling and fun for others as it is for me! – Virginia Hein 2025

Workshop Schedule:
Sunday Night: Welcome Reception at 6pm
Monday – Thursday: 9am – 4pm
Friday: 9am – 2pm

Workshop Description