From the Sketchboook

My sketchbook is a big Fabriano Venezia one that measures about 9x12 inches (23x30 cm). I love the paper in it and I love drawing and sketching in it.

Sometimes I take it with me outside on my walks and sometimes I sit with it at my worktable. Here are some of my latest pages:

Parts of these spreads you may have already seen in other posts, but I thought it might be nice to get the full picture. As you can see not everything is picture perfect (just look at those horses, haha).

The first two spreads are the result of my walks and the last spread is done after my favorite source for models: a mail order catalogue. ;-) I'm not too crazy about the girl on the left, but I like how the right one turned out. In the end it's the practice that matters to me, so I like having both of them in there.

I hope you are sketching or painting or doing something else wonderfully artsy in your neck of the woods!

Patterns from the Fodder Book

In the Fodder Book (a large moleskine watercolour book) I mostly experiment with abstracts and patterns in watercolour. If you've been following me for a while you know my latest love is a masking liquid marker by molotow which allows you to make very precise lines that you can later rub away to leave the white of the paper.

My latest experiments lead to this (you can see the marker in the top right of the picture):

I based these two pages on drawings I did in my pattern book. It was fun to use a previous design on something completely new.  I usually pick five or six colours of paint that I want to work with on the spread so the two pages are in harmony with each other.

Here's a closer look at the two designs:

I absolutely love these. The colours are so deep and beautiful and I really like the patterns themselves too.

I don't think I'll grow tired of these masking liquid markers any time soon, so you can be sure there will be more patterns in the future!

Wishing you all a wonderful and artsy day.

The Amsterdam Pages

As you know I went to Amsterdam last month for a few days. If you missed it, you can read all about it here, here and here.

This time I didn't take a 'real' journal with me, but I did bring my smart phone and a notebook and I did collect tons of ephemera. When I got back home I made copies of the notes I took while I was there, I printed a bunch of photographs and I picked out my favorite ephemera and got to work in my journal Flora. It lead to what I call 'The Amsterdam Pages'. Ten spreads that are a full travel report.

Here's how they turned out:

On this spread you can see the only sketch I did while I was there. ;-)

As you can see, some pages have interactive elements in them to make them extra interesting.

I have to admit it was a bit of a chore to put this together as in general I prefer to make most of a travel journal while I'm away, but this trip was so short that I decided on this approach. And I'm happy I now have some good memories to look into in my regular journal.

Hope you enjoyed this peek into my travel report and I wish you a wonderful and artsy day!

Autumn

Autumn is here and I have the pictures to prove it!

Hope you're having a bit of extra colour in your life as well, whether it's autumn where you live or not. Enjoy it!

Have a wonderful and artsy weekend!

A birthday card for Monkie

My creative friend Monique (aka Monkie, you can find her blog here) had her birthday last week and as is custom with us I had to make her a little something. I decided on a birthday card that was fully made up of my colourful doodles.

The card has four pages that are filled to the brim and each has some words from a Dutch birthday song. I drew the card with a fineliner gelpen and coloured it in with tombow dual brush markers.

Here are the four pages up close:

As you can see I chose a different colour scheme for each page, mostly because that gave me a bit of  variety while I was making it, because even though it's a small card, these doodles take a lot of time to do! ;-)

I hope my friend liked receiving this card as much as I enjoyed making it!

A storm in the studio

A niece of mine works for a paper factory and often gets to keep remnants from her work. She generously shares these papers with her friends and family and since she knows I'm the creative type I am one of the lucky recipients!

Not long ago she gifted me a big pack of large size papers. The only downside (if you want to call it that) is that the paper is lilac in colour. But hey, I'm the creative type and I own gesso, so who cares?
The paper is beautifully thick (cardstock quality) and handles wonderfully, so I'm very pleased with it.

Sometimes I use it underneath my work to protect the surface of my table, sometimes I tear it up in pieces and sometimes something like this happens:

I had originally intended to just do a big abstract background with colours and shapes and then cut it into pieces to form the base for smaller abstracts. But while I was working on it the shapes reminded me of leaves and flowers blowing in the wind. And then before I knew it this piece became about an autumn storm! So I started working with that, adding the lettering and details. 

I like how the muse works like that sometimes, if you're willing to go with it that is. I rarely work this big, but I did enjoy the process very much. I'm very much a believer in doing the work and showing up and not waiting for inspiration, but sometimes inspiration is handed to you on a platter!

Here are some details of the work:

I'm quite taken with it!

Of course I could no longer bear to cut it up now, so instead I took a truckload (as in dozens and dozens) of close up pictures to serve as a base for abstracts at some future point. That way I still had fulfilled my original purpose. ;-)

Hope you are all visited by a stormy muse sometimes and wishing you a wonderful and artsy day!