The aroma of a freshly brewed coffee mingles with the chirping chorus of birds in a sun-kissed Algarve cafe. These feathered bandits are fearless, snatching crumbs from unsuspecting patrons. While my usual holiday sketches depict botanical illustrations or lovely landscapes, this Portuguese trip ignited a new passion for bird drawings: capturing the playful spirit of these cheeky creatures.

A real delight about visiting family in Portugal is the ability to regularly spend time at a favourite beach bar, sipping coffee, people watching and drawing what I see. This time it was the human forms of the bathing beauties that caught my eye and to my surprise I gained a new found confidence in life drawing. In three short days I saw my sketches improve, here’s how I did it...

Taking a sketchbook for a walk outside is a marvellous way to record details of the world around you.  Feeling the forms of a view through your fingertips, as the pencil moves across a page, gives a richer understanding of what you see.  As a practicing fine artist this is why I’ve always got a couple of Moleskine’s on the go.

Ever since I was little road trips have been a time for drawing and colouring in. In recent years I’ve taken this literally and used car passenger time for filling my Moleskine sketchbooks with views of the motorway. As a mixed media landscape artist it provides an opportunity to practice eye feasting and quick response drawing as views zoom by.

Drawing boats has long been a mini ambition of mine. Many times I’ve visualised the process of wanting to capture their distinctive shapes and bright colours on a page. Keen to put this ambition into action I went to Beadnall, on the Northumberland coast. With sketchbook in hand, I found a vantage point overlooking the harbour and began to draw; putting into practice what I saw in my mind’s eye.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if drawing outside had one of those good for the soul type names like the rather trendy shinrin-yoku or “forest bathing”. Yes there’s the term en plein air (translation “in the open air”) which despite sounding somewhat romantic in French seems to fall a little short of soulful when translated into English.