I taught a new class (new to me) this month at UC Berkeley Extension: Graphics Bootcamp, it finished up this past weekend. It is two full 8 hour days of instruction held on two consecutive Saturdays. Since I hadn't taught this before, I had a lot of preparation to do which was fun to pull together. I did most of my planning at my favorite coffee shop, Julie's in Alameda, so I could focus. Being at Julie's begins a whole other story for another time (check back next month - early October). First I looked through my favorite books on landscape graphics:From left to right above, that is an old edition of Drawing the Landscape by Chip Sullivan, an old edition of Landscape Graphics by Grant Reid, my 3-ring binder of images and drawings (kickin' it old school with the binder), the relatively new book Freehand Drawing and Discovery by one of my favorite people James Richards, Drawing and Designing with Confidence by Mike Lin, the current (Sept 2014) copy of Landscape Architecture Magazine put out by the ASLA that had some nice concept sketches in it, and my big pile of notes, exercises, and general mayhem (in the orange folder) see below:Then I watched about 12 hours of how to videos on YouTube. I borrowed exercises from the books, made some up, tried all of them against a timer, wrote the syllabus and my own lesson plan list, gathered inspiring links and images on Pinterest and stuffed a black and decker toolbox full of colored pencils, pens, pastels, markers, and so forth. I steeped myself in beautiful drawings for about a month. I was surrounded with color and texture and started to realize that the pressure of doing everything faster while I was working for others, the drive to take everything to the computer, to use technology, had allowed me to set up some uncreative habits.Now with class done, I don't want to use the renderings I am about to send to a client - renderings I did in Photoshop that will probably suffice, but did not necessarily take less time than if I'd done the work by hand. I believe that I can do the renderings faster by hand, and they will be more interesting. The only drawback is that there are more steps - in Photoshop I sit here entering information on the computer, and then my work is instantly available to be emailed because it is already digital. There are no trips to the local print store, no scanning an oversize sheet, none of that. What it lacks, and maybe this is the fault of my Photoshop skills, is a certain amount of soul. Don't get me wrong; I have a Wacom drawing tablet that allows me to make a drawing on Photoshop look like it is hand-drawn, but there's still something about touching markers and colored pencils to real paper that adds an intangible bit of heart.I've heard the adage that 'if you want to learn, teach', and I suppose I knew that I would learn a great deal by teaching a new subject. However, what I did not expect was how completely inspired and excited I would become in the process. You can expect that the next project I post will have hand-drawn graphics to go with it.