Drawing as a Love Language & Dancing with Line and Color
Workshop at Willow Pond SLO with Virginia Hein, May 2024
Dancing with Line and Color
Long before Hein came to embody herself as an artist or an educator, Albert Einstein somehow described what Virginia Hein does best, “It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.” And Hein considers drawing to be her first language.
Being in the right place at the right time is exactly how it felt to be gathered around the pond with watercolors, mid-spring, and green in full bloom at the May 2024 workshop with Virginia Hein. Her support and curiosity were contagious and soon the artists overcame fear and shifted their mindsets from failure to success.
With an open-hearted emphasis on really seeing and settling into those first nervy 5 minutes of a sketch, her students were able to experience how line and color each play expressive parts in a sketch. Hein assured that the magic happens when we let each of these elements do what it does best, encouraging an attitude of an experiment.
Over the three days, her guidance coaxed the artists to develop a range of expressive marks and lines revealing an exciting visual story. Then Hein encouraged the students to show their colors! Bringing emotion, contrast, and harmony to their sketches. Virginia Hein demonstrated the small yet mighty act of leaving something out. There was no shortage of fun around the pond, drawing and painting with the esteemed Otis College Instructor herself. The artist students shared their incredible, vibrant, and expressive color sketches and many cheers around the table were had.
About the Artist
Virginia Hein is an artist, author, and art instructor from Los Angeles, California. She counts herself lucky to have worked as an artist in one form or another throughout her life, as a concept and character designer for toys and entertainment, art director, illustrator, and teacher. She taught drawing to aspiring toy designers at Otis College of Art and Design for 13 years and now focuses on teaching sketching workshops locally and internationally.
She has been an active member of the international community of Urban Sketchers since 2009 and has been honored to teach workshops at five international Urban Sketchers Symposiums. In 2023 she was an exhibitor and instructor at Sketcher Fest in Edmonds, Washington, the first-ever travel sketchbook event in North America. She has contributed her work to several books and other publications about location sketching. Her book “5 Minute Sketching Landscapes”, was published by RotoVision, in 2017, and she co-authored “The Urban Sketching Handbook Spotlight on Nature”, Quarry Books, 2022, with Gail L. Wong.
