Flowers & Plants

The new watercolor course Wild Garden will start next week! Exciting! I have been working on this course since the beginning of June and have tried to make it my best course ever. >> Sign up here!

I recorded the intro in various places in our garden on a sunny day last month.

There is a variety of projects, big and small, and I also share some short technique practices.

My goal is that you feel like you are sitting right beside me, and we are creating together at my home.

We will create freely so that you won’t be accurately copying my piece, but you get techniques, tips, and ideas so that your painting grows with mine.

There are practices that grow your skills for making the paintings beautiful.

We examine light, shadows, hope, and mysteries that can be found in a garden and in nature in general.

Bold strokes are combined with thin and more delicate ones.

And of course, we play with color and let water also make the blooms.

Wild Garden – Sign Up Now!

This is the watercolor course who loves nature and flowers. In Wild Garden, we will paint freely, intuitively, and expressively from Sept 22 to Nov 14. We will begin with floral greeting cards and gradually move forward in expression. The projects are fun, and I will be there in the videos even more present than ever.
>> Sign up now!

Watch the inspiring video and sign up now!

This week, I tell about our garden and share my watercolor paintings that have been influenced by it.

We bought our current house in the fall of 2011. We had had small terraced yards before so at first, we didn’t pay much attention to the yard and mostly focused on the house.

However, the big lawn slowly turned into a garden when my husband and I started adding plants.

And now when I look back at my art years later, plants slowly started to take over there too. We bought the house, but it was the surrounding yard that changed us.

Big Changes

My husband really got into gardening and in 2018 he made his long-time dream come true when the front yard was transformed into a Japanese garden.

In 2023, the backyard got a bigger makeover when my husband built a pond and the boring lawn was transformed into a pergola with English-style plantings and meadows.

Local Nature and Watercolor

The words “English” or “Japanese” don’t describe our garden as well as “forest” and “water.” Our garden is a mix of external influences and Finnish nature. We have pines, birches, and wild flowers too.

There is water – not only in a pond loved by small birds – but we also have a stone water bowl “tsukubai”, and an imaginary water area built of sand.

Our garden has a couple of berry bushes, strawberries for birds, two apple trees and a cherry tree, but it cannot be called a vegetable garden.

The front yard is dominated by conifers and flowers such as a huge hydrangea and many peonies and roses. The backyard has grasses and flowering perennials.

Garden in Watercolor

The garden is my husband’s artwork, but for me, weeding and planting is not enough, I need brushes.

By painting, the story of a place changes to a more personal story. Rather than accurately sketching the specific locations, we should let nature immerse in us, and then express its beauty freely.

Wild Garden – Paint with Me!

In the upcoming course Wild Garden we will paint flowers freely, intuitively, and expressively in watercolor. Sign up here!

Wild Garden will begin on September 22, 2025. Sign up now!