A Forest Walk

It's no secret I love fall and winter so the current time of year makes me very happy. In fact I already feel like time is going way too fast when it's only a few weeks before we will have the shortest amount of daylight (December 21st). I love the long nights, the cool air, the way everything becomes quiet and first colourful and then sort of desolate. This is my season!

This is also the perfect time of year for a walk in the woods. On one of my recent walks I brought my camera so I could take you with me without having to take you with me, if you know what I mean. I do love to walk on my own without distractions, haha.

Here's an impression of a nice forest walk:

It wasn't until I came home that I found out that I had set the colour setting in my camera wrong so things look a bit more green than they were. I was a bit bummed by that, but I still think the pictures are rather pretty and I hope you think so too.

Wishing you all a wonderful and artsy day!

From the Morning Book

As the end of the year approaches so does the end of my Morning Book. I'm not there yet and I may not finish it completely within this year, but I have only about ten pages to go. I guess it depends on how intricate those pages are whether or not I will finish this year.

In any case I am already thinking about my next Morning Book. What paper? What size? And most of all: how will I fill it? I have all sorts of ideas, but nothing is decided yet. All I know is that my morning art practice of half an hour a day will continue after the current book is full. And that is good to know! ;-)

Here are six pages that I finished recently:

This is the one I showed as a step by step in my previous post.

The first two pages were drawn with a drawing pen and coloured in with (washed) Derwent Inktense pencils. The rest was done with my favorite markers: Faber Castell Pittpens. They absolutely love the paper in this journal (a Dylusions square one), because it's so smooth and solid.

As you can see I have a lot of fun experimenting with the same colour combinations in different setups. Pattern play just makes me happy.

Wishing you all a wonderful and artsy weekend!

A grid mandala - step by step

Working on the Morning Book every morning for only half an hour means that with more intricate pages I almost accidentally can take step by step pictures of how a page comes into being. Because after all it will take several sittings for a page to be finished.

The Morning Book is also a very good place to experiment with ideas just to see what happens. Today  I thought I'd show you how my very first grid mandala came into being. 'Grid mandala' is a term I made up for doing a grid drawing that starts in the center and symmetrically works its way outward. It kind of looks like a mosaic as well.

Every picture in this post was taken at the end of a Morning Book session, so the progress you see is by one half hour step each. 

I started by drawing a grid in pencil with the help of a ruler. Also with the help of a Spook. ;-)

I started drawing the shapes with the help of the grid starting in the center and working my way outward. 

After finishing the drawing I erased the pencil lines and got out my inktense pencils to begin colouring.

Again I am working outward from the center making sure to repeat the same thing on all sides.

I used a limited amount of colours so the colours themselves are recurring all over the drawing.

After colouring everything in I took out a brush and started washing the colours with water to really make them pop.

And after three and a half hours (seven mornings)  the grid mandala was finished.

I'm still not totally sure about this colour combination, but I did really enjoy the process and it gave me a whole new grid/mosaic type art to explore. Grid mandalas! ;-)

Using the watersoluble inktense pencils made this page extra time consuming. If I had used markers I might have finished this page in four sittings, but I wanted to experiment with those pencils on the smooth paper in my Morning Book. For those interested: my Morning Book is a Dylusions art journal.

If you want to follow the process of my Morning Book pages real time you can follow me on Instagram or Facebook, because I post an image there every morning.

Wishing you a wonderful and artsy day!

Colouring Freebies

Not so long ago I asked if any of you would be interested in colouring in one of my grid drawings yourself and it seems that some of you are! So I set to work and made two drawings for you to colour in.

One is a kind of square mosaic mandala and the other is more a tapestry kind of grid drawing. If you click on the images below you will be linked directly to my Flickr page where you can download the image in different sizes to your liking. The download button on the Flickr page is in the bottom right corner of the black screen.

Here are the two images I made for you, they are A4 in size. If you use a different standard size paper I'm sure your printer has an option to fit an image to the page and you should be okay.

I hope you will have a lot of fun picking colours and filling in all the little pieces. I do know it was hard for me not to colour these in straight away, because to me they are now terribly unfinished and as soon as I have posted these as a freebie I will no doubt colour them in after all, haha.

Please let me know if you have trouble downloading either of these. I did test them and it should be allright, but you never know.

Most importantly though I hope you will show me your coloured in pages. I am so curious how other people would fill these in. I might even do a post about that so you can admire each others work.

Good luck and enjoy and have a wonderful and artsy day!

Let's go to Wildlands Zoo - part two of two

Today I want to show you the rest of the pictures I took on our work trip to the Wildlands Zoo in Emmen. Of course I took many many more pictures than I'm showing you and I would have taken even more if I had had more time to do so. I was there with a bunch of other people after all and there just wasn't enough time to really take it all in, so I'm hoping to return there one day soon with just my camera for company and really just shoot pictures all day. We'll see when that happens.

For now here's the rest of the pics for your viewing pleasure:

And thus, with a nest of otters, I conclude our trip to the zoo! ;-)

As you can see I love taking pictures of abstract details of a place as well. That first picture is one of my favourites for just that reason. I always call those types of pics Carin-photos, because I'm never quite sure if anyone other than me can understand why I'm fascinated by images like that. But that doesn't keep me from taking them, oh no!

Hope you enjoyed coming with me vicariously and I wish you all a wonderful and artsy day.

Let's go to Wildlands Zoo - part one of two

Every year my employer organizes an outing for my coworkers and me. We close the town hall where I work and we go on a bit of an adventure. It's a lot of fun and sometimes we go to places that are quite photogenic so I bring my camera.

This year we went to the just recently finished Wildlands Zoo in Emmen. If you have a very good memory you may remember that last year I went to the old zoo in Emmen for a photography trip for my birthday. You can see those photographs here and here.

That zoo is now closed and in it's place has come something very different. It still is a zoo sort of, but it's much more a kind of adventure into three different worlds where there just happen to also be animals. One world has a very tropical Middle American type of atmosphere, another is more African and the third is very arctic. They went through a lot of trouble to make things look interesting and beautiful and also to give the animals a lot of space. This means there are way fewer animals than in a regular zoo, but also that everything looks just stunning.

In this post and the next I want to give you a little impression of the new Wildlands Zoo. Hope you enjoy!

I know the place seems a little deserted in my pics, but I do that on purpose. It was actually quite busy and I simply often waited for just the right moment. I never really cared for people in my photographs, haha. I did actually take quite a few pictures of my coworkers too, but I'm not putting those on the web for obvious privacy reasons. :-)

Next post I'll show you the rest of the photographs and until then I wish you all a wonderful and artsy day!