Mail Art Time!

Oh my poor Snail Mail Listers! They have to be so patient with me. Some of them have not even received one card yet. I did warn you in advance it might take some time, but I still want to do a bit better this year and send out at least one set of cards every month so all of you may get one or two cards a year.

Very recently I finally got around to making a series of eight cards again. The reason it is mostly eight at a time is that I use these paper blocks with eight different varieties of the same colour in them. In this case that variety was purples and pinks.

Here are the cards up close:

Making these cards is a pretty time consuming job. I enjoy it very much though. The collage and setting up an attractive layout is always a challenge. It also makes me use lots of my washi tapes and pretty papers and stamps.

As for the Snail Mail List I am not taking any new 'members'. There's forty people on it now and that's the maximum I wanted. I'm very grateful for all of you who showed an interest in it when I first put the call out.

For those of you not on the list or whose turn it isn't this time around I hope you at least enjoyed looking at the cards and that somebody else is sending you some lovely art mail.

Wishing you all a wonderful and artsy day.

Morning Paintings #301-310

As I am writing this I did my last morning painting about six weeks ago and have already initiated a new morning art practice for almost a month. But there are still 30 paintings to show you on the blog, so I want to get those out of the way before I move on to my current practice. I am also intending to do a post on what a  year of painting every morning has done for me, so I'm not really finished them yet, haha.

Here are paintings number 301 to 310:

#301 - Gauze

#302 - Connect the Dots

#303 - Connect the Dots

#304 - Diamonds and Lines

#305 - Striped Diamonds

#306 - Striped Diamonds

#307 - Pattern

#308 - Triangle Party

#309 - Dashed Diamonds

#310 - Circles in Dashed Squares

All paintings were done in gouache as ususal. I really came to love the student quality gouache box by Caran d'Ache that I used for almost all of them. I also really came to love the paintbrush I used (a Talens Van Gogh filament watercolour brush). After a year there's no way you can not become very familiar with a material if you use it every day. 

The further I came along in my paintings the more I preferred to just paint patterns. Sometimes the patterns were very straight (I used a ruler to set up the pattern in pencil then) and sometimes I just did them fully by hand. I am a control freak so I prefer the very straight and uptight ones, haha, but I do see how the more loosely done ones have a bit more character.

I hope you enjoyed this peek into my morning paintings and I wish you all a wonderful and artsy day.

The Texel Book - a peek in my travel journal (part two of two)

Here's the second part of the travel journal I filled during my trip to Texel in January.

I must admit it was quite a challenge for me to do the whole thing in black and white. After a while I really started to miss my colours and I had to keep myself from buying paints or coloured pencils while I was there, especially when I came across a really nice art supply store. ;-)

I'm glad I didn't give into temptation, because I like how the journal turned out, but it sure was nice to be back home afterwards and have all my supplies at hand again.

Anyway, here's another peek in the journal:

And that's all I have to show you from that journal.

There are still about fifty pages left in it. Those I will fill with some of the photographs I took, but since I already did a huge slideshow of those for you all I think it will be okay if I don't show that when it's finished. I do think they will make the journal a complete travel report though and that's what a travel journal is all about.

Well, it took me a while, but looks like I finally got my Texel vacation out of my system. Blogwise that is, because in real life I still remember it very fondly very often.

I hope you enjoyed traveling with me and looking through my journal and I'll see you next time when we will resume or regular programming, whatever that means, haha.

Until then have a wonderful and artsy day all!

The Texel Book - a peek in my travel journal (part one of two)

Before I go on vacation I am always full of ambitious plans for the travel journal I will make. But then often right before my trip starts I change it all around and go for something simple instead.

My trip to Texel was no different. Ahead of time I was planning on bringing a lot of supplies and even my tiny Selphy printer so I could print my photographs while I was there. It was going to be fantastic!

In the end all I took was a small tote with a bunch of black pens, a waterbrush, a glue roller and some scissors. Oh yes, and a journal of course:

I decided on a Canson Art Book 180. I had previously used a book with the same type of  paper for a regular journal and I fell in love with that paper. It is not really thick and there's a lot of ghosting going on, but nothing bleeds through and it can take a lot of wet media without going to pieces. I also love how the paper sounds after it has been wetted. It's hard to explain, but there's a crinkly sound to it that is absolutely irresistible.  know, I'm weird.

In this post and the next I will give you a peek in this travel journal, which I (original and inventive as always) named The Texel Book (Het Texel Boek).

As you will see the entire book is done in black and white, except for the little ephemera you pick up during a trip. I did a lot of simple letter drawings and even some sketching here and there. For the sketching I used watersoluble pens that I wetted with  the waterbrush, which with a certain fineliner often gave a purple effect that I really liked.

Of course I also did a lot of writing. I'm only showing you the spreads with some visual elements to them, but just so you know, there are a ton of spreads with only writing and things like bus tickets and tea packaging on them. ;-)

Let's have a look, shall we?

This is what most of the writing spreads look like.

Here I had a bit of a journal crisis. ;-)

As you can see some of my letter drawings are in English and some in Dutch and some both. There's absolutely no rhyme or reason to that. I just put down what's in my head. Most of them are simply announcements of what day it is or things I did that day.

As for the sketches, I did most of those at night back in my apartment after photographs I had taken that day. The only one I did 'live' in the above ones is the  one of the apple pie and coffee. I've said it before: I'm a comfort sketcher. I take very little pleasure in standing in the cold and wind outside trying to sketch a scenery. I'd rather walk and take it all in and then sketch behind a table sitting on a comfortable chair.

Well, that's the first part of my travel journal. Second part next post.

Wishing you all a wonderful and artsy weekend!