Around here lately

 Just some random daily life photographs from my Instagram/Facebook in the past weeks. 

The fast ferry in times of corona. Screens everywhere.

Drawing and ice coffee at the marina, after a nice walk. 

Reading in my back yard during a heat wave. 

I took part of the summer version of Dewey's Readathon. Highly recommend this book by the way. 

My lounge chair, but not my cat.

Taking the ferry to the main land for another cancer check up. All is still well. 

Breakfast with a book on a lazy Sunday.

Things to do when you are two hours early for your eye doctor appointment.

Last March our regular ferry struck a leak. Five months later she was finally back in business. 

Went to the Drents Museum and had a marvelous day. 

Because of corona there was no Into The Great Wide Open Festival this year,
but the local school children did make the newspaper for it
and it got delivered all over the island.  

Sometimes I like to take a day off just because and laze about with my cat. 

These are troubling times we live in right now,  and my personal health is always a bit of a worry since cancer dropped by for a visit last year, even though I feel pretty good. All the more reason to keep focusing on the good stuff in life. It's what keeps me anchored and sane. Difficult things will find you, no matter what, so it's up to us to keep looking for beauty and contentment wherever we can find it. It's not always easy, but it is worth it. 

Hope you are enjoying the treasures that life brings in between the struggles and wishing you all a wonderful and artsy day. 

Collage Cards

I like to send (and receive) mail art, and I like collage. So it's only natural that from time to time I make a series of collage cards to send as snail mail. 

Collage is such a liberating form of art making. It's just mixing and matching elements until I have a composition that is appealing to me. I never plan my collages, I just start somewhere and then see what I will do next. They kind of come together despite myself, haha.

Here are eight collage cards that I recently finished.

Since they just come together organically I never really think about the meaning of my collages as I make them. But they always seem to end up being about beauty and living the good life. I guess that's simply what appeals to me naturally. 

Hope you are doing something that feels easy and liberating in your creative endeavours and wishing you a wonderful and artsy day. 

 

My First Digital Patterns

When I got myself an iPad and the Apple Pencil I secretly hoped it would turn me into an actual sketcher. You know, those people who draw 'real things'? I have such admiration for people like that. But if anything, digital drawing proved to me that abstract nonsense is my jam. 

It's not that I can't draw, it's just that I don't get half as much pleasure out of sketching and drawing real things than I do out of ....um...unreal things?  Patterns, mandala's, doodles, mosaics, I just seem to live for those and that didn't change when I learned to work in Procreate, the drawing app that I mostly use.

In fact it made it even more attractive, because Procreate comes with a wide variety of drawing guides, so I can set up grids and isometrics and all kinds of stuff in any way I want and draw to my hearts delight. And even better: the guides are not part of the drawing, so unlike grid or isometric paper, the guidelines don't show in the final drawing. 

Working in layers gives a lot of extra possibilities too and the amount of available colors seems literally endless. I can pick my color palettes from my own  photographs for instance or from available online coloring sites. And then of course there are the many brushes that are available. From ink to pencil to crayon to whatever. 

So here are a bunch of pattern drawings that I did in the first months of learning to use Procreate. 

I want to point out that when I do these drawings it's important to me to 'do the work'. By that I mean that, especially in repeat patterns, it would have been quicker to use things like copy paste or just literally repeat a part of a drawing, but that's not where the enjoyment lies for me. So just like when I work on paper I colored in every little square, rectangle and triangle by hand. 

Because Procreate allows me to make more elaborate grids than on paper this means that working on a pattern drawing takes more time digitally than it does on paper. Many hours go into one drawing. I think my personal record was 21 hours (not one of the above by the way). I know this because Procreate actually measures the time you work on a drawing. 

I think what I like most about digital drawing is how you have an endles amount of possibilities and supplies on hand in one compact tablet. It's like having a full studio on hand without having to drag tons of supplies with you. 

Hope you are doing well and enjoying your own endless possibilities wherever you are, and wishing you a wonderful and artsy day.

Winter Walk in Black and White

We are just coming out of a few weeks of very hot summer weather over here, and if you have been an regular visitor of this blog you may already know that I am not a lover of summer and heat. I am already looking eagerly at the light at the end of the tunnel that mere mortals call autumn. 

Don't get me wrong, I can see the beauty of summer and the way things grow and bloom and to be fair most of our summers on the island are pretty mild, but the last few weeks have confirmed once again that I am mostly made for fall and winter.

That may be why when I went looking for pictures to put in this post I couldn't resist a series of black and white photographs that I took while on a winter walk last season. So if you too need to cool down a little I have just the post for you! 

It's hard to imagine that all those trees were so bare and the land so rough. I can't wait for that to happen again, well...after a colourful fall of course, don't want to miss that. ;-)

Hope you are enjoying the slow change of seasons wherever you are and wishing you all a wonderful and artsy day!

Six from one

As you  know I draw a lot of rather rigid patterns and I love them very much, but from time to time I do long for a bit more loose drawing with a bit less control. That doesn't come as easy to me as my strict patterns.  I'm a control freak in my art as I am in life.  

So I figured it wouldn't hurt to broaden my horizon a little. 

I happened to have this book in my collection:

It's about exactly what it says: expressive drawing. The drawings in it are not always to my taste, but the idea behind them certainly is, so I decided to do some exercises from this book just to see if I could loosen up a little. This post is about one such exercise.

The idea was to make a simple line drawing in pen and then copy that drawing several times and continue to work on them so you have multiple drawings stemming from the same original drawing. 

So I did the following line drawing:

After that I got to work over several weeks on different approaches to this drawing in order to finish it. That led to the folowing six drawings:

It was really interesting to see what different materials and different approaches could lead to. It was a fun experiment and it sure got me thinking out of the box. 

I will definitely try some more ideas from this book in the future. 

Hope you are experimenting with some fun ideas and wishing you a wonderful and artsy day.