A little reminder

Things left on the beach

I love walking the beach as it's different every time I go there. I also love the things one can find in the sand. Some are left by nature and some have a definite human touch to them. Here are some findings from my latest walks.

Jaime Hayon

Last Friday I got to visit the Groninger Museum. I had wanted to go in my vacation, but didn't get around to it.

I was absolutely blown away by the work of artist/designer Jaime Hayon. Of course I most loved the look we were given into his dozens upon dozens if sketchbooks. Oh, I would have loved to leaf through those!

Anyway, I took some pics so I wouldn't forget all the cool stuff I saw and I thought I might as well share them with you.

Wishing you a wonderful and artsy week.

PS I am trying out the blogger app, so if things look a little different from usual now you know why. I'm hoping this version works better than the one I tried a few years ago. Fingers crossed.

Finishing up the White Book!

Oh my, it is done! It is really done! Just about a year and a month after I started it I finally finished the White Book!

Here are some of it's last spreads:

And here is how it looks now on the outside: 

It's not as pristine as it was when it started, I can tell you that! But it has tons of character now. It's about three times as fat as it was. Cool detail: some spreads of it will be featured in a book by Dawn Sokol that will come out in 2015 with journal pages from all over the world! I'm very proud of that.

All in all this book gave me a lot of challenges and it also made me realise I don't want a big book like this again in the near future. I want something I can fill within a few months, this one just took too long. 

But...I'm happy with yet another full journal. It will now live with my other journals and I have already picked out a successor, but that's for another time!

Wishing you all a wonderful and artsy weekend!

The Midwinter Book 13/14

For the past few years I've kept a seperate journal during my Christmas vacation and this time was no different. I usually call this a midwinter book. It's always a different kind of book and this time I decided to use the small Dylusions journal that I had gotten at Kreadoe.

The first thing I did was alter it a little so it would look more like a ... well... Midwinter Book!

I did manage to fill the entire book in a little over two weeks, but most of it was writing, so even though that was very good for me it's not very interesting to look at for you.

But I did do some visual things here and there and here's a selection of some of those more colourful or interesting pages.

 

I really liked the paper in this book and its size. It was very handy to take with you and it could take just about any medium okay, although it's best suited for pencil and pens. I might be hesitant with lots of watercolour layers, it did seem to get roughened up a bit if it got too wet. But still, I think I will buy more of these journals as they seem pretty all round to me.

The drawings of the branches are my personal favorites in this journal. They were done from my imagination after seeing some twirly twisty branches on my walks and being intrigued by them. It also reminded me of my love for simple pencil drawings. It had been a long time since I did any of those. By the way, don't confuse simple with fast, because especially the second one took forever to finish with all that crosshatching for the background. ;-)

The journal was a good companion in a very reflective time so I am quite happy I filled most of it with writing. It helped me think things through and really get to the bottom of stuff I'm currently dealing with. It also reminded me a journal is not for pretty pages, but an instrument for personal expression and reflection. That's easy to forget sometimes, especially if you're used to sharing your pages on your blog.

I hope you enjoyed this peek in my vacation journal and I wish you a wonderful and artsy Wednesday!

This place I call home

Most of my vacation was spent at home. And when I say at home I don't just mean my house, I mean my island of course. I have no idea how many miles I walked during those two and a half weeks off, but they were many. And so of course also the amount of photographs I took were many. And when I say  many I mean a little over 900!

Don't worry, I'm not going to show you all of them. In fact you will be proud of me when I say I've managed to bring them down to a small enough amount for this one post, 18 to be exact.

It helps that often the weather was too gray to really take good photographs, so most of them weren't that great anyway. ;-)

Here's a few that I really liked:

I don't think I'll ever tire of this place I call home. It keeps astounding me with its beauty and its wide open spaces. I may also never tire of taking pictures of it, if only to help me remember how fortunate I am that I get to live here.

Wishing you all a wonderful and artsy weekend!