Jenny Faw steps lightly up the wooden front steps of what she calls her “princess shed” — a small, sturdy outpost built for her by her husband, the architect Peter McDonald, in their Eastham backyard. The shed has big windows and a doorway framed by purple clematis.

Inside, a desk is divided into two halves; two chairs preside over their separate kingdoms. “That’s my smart-girl chair,” says Faw pointing to the larger of the two, a cushioned, rolling desk chair. On that side of the desk are the computers Faw uses to digitize her artwork.

The other chair is small, red, and bears on its legs the unmistakable marks of an enthusiastic dog’s teeth. Faw’s little black Lab, Nyx, spends time here.

“She’s my muse,” says Faw.

This side of the desk is her artist studio: jars of murky water, paintbrushes big and small, a stack of in-use palettes, rubber cement and sponges give it away. On the wall above the desk hang watercolors of rainbow-colored hummingbirds, bright sunflowers and roses, ladybugs, bees, mushrooms, and Planet Earth surrounded by twisting vines and flowers.

“Color is my happy place,” Faw says. Born in Manhattan, Kansas — “the Little Apple,” says Faw — she started her career at Hallmark before moving to the other Manhattan in the late ’80s. There she got a job as a textile designer, but soon enough illustration became her focus.

Now she works as a commercial artist, licensing her work to decorate everything from dinnerware to greeting cards to shower curtains, and in the summers shows her framed artworks with the Eastham Painters Guild — an opportunity she says is a big deal for her. In college at the University of Kansas’s School of Architecture & Design, she studied graphic design. “The fine artists turned up their noses because we weren’t real artists,” she says. “We were commercial.” Being part of the guild makes her feel accepted.

On a table nearby is a painting on watercolor paper of a cardinal perched on a branch of holly. It’s left over from June, she says, when she was working on material for Christmas. The cardinal is beautiful, almost surreal. “My feeling is, if you want realistic, take a photo,” she says.

In the off-season, Faw teaches classes at the Eastham Senior Center. During the summer, she runs workshops from home. On July 6, as part of the annual Cape Cod Hydrangea Festival, she’ll teach a two-hour workshop: painting hydrangeas with watercolors.

Faw’s instructions for workshop participants start with “Check all your stress and anxiety at the door.” Her aim is to foster a meditative atmosphere. There are stretching and breathing exercises as well as painting warm-ups on scrap paper.

She teaches students how to begin with an abstract background, a wash of color, then add the details — the outlines of petals, leaves, stems. She says she’s also “big on tricks”: a sprinkle of salt on wet watercolor paint sucks the paint away and leaves white starbursts behind; the dab of a sponge will blur and mottle color; using a liquid “resist” will allow for white accents, spaces, and designs.

Teaching is only partly about watercolor techniques like bleeding colors and layering paint to achieve different levels of opacity and transparency. Experimentation is the fun of it, Faw says. Some of her “toughest students,” she says, are experienced painters, artists who have established their own style and have difficulty just playing around with paints.

Faw keeps a file of her students’ hydrangea art. Each piece shows a hydrangea in full bloom, but each is different from the other: some wispy and loose and others tight and geometric. The blues, purples and pinks glow soft or saturated.

She loves them all. “Hydrangeas,” she says, “are very forgiving.”

Blues Clues

The event: Jenny Faw’s hydrangea watercolor workshop
The time: Saturday, July 6, 10 a.m. to noon and 1 to 3 p.m.
The place: 560 Doane Road, Eastham
The cost: $70 at members.easthamchamber.com