Happy Holidays

Dear blogsy people,

I just want to wish you a wonderful Christmas time. If you don't celebrate Christmas I hope you have a wonderful time anyway in whatever tradition you do or do not follow. ;-)

I will be taking a little blog break between Christmas and New Year's and I will be back somewhere in the first week of January.

Thank you all for your support and love in the past year. It is really appreciated. You make my life a little richer and better and you inspire me to keep making my artsy stuff!

Love,

Caatje

Colouring in my own freebies

About a month ago I offered you some free printable colouring pages with grid drawings on them.

I have to tell you it was really hard for me to leave those two images uncoloured so I could scan them for you. The way I usually work is that I go straight from the drawing to the colouring.

However, after I posted them on the blog there was nothing stopping me from colouring in the originals and so I did and here they are:

I coloured them in with my lovely pittpens (by Faber Castell) and I like how they turned out.  It's also a bit of strange relieve to know they are now really finished, haha.

If you want to take a shot at colouring them in yourself you can of course still find them in my November post over here. Enjoy.

Wishing you all a wonderful and artsy day.

The Project Book (the journal I almost forgot to show you)

Last July I took a break from blogging and from my morning art practice and actually a bit of a break from life. You can read why in this post from June 30. 

The one thing I didn't take a break from was journaling, because it always helps me to get my thoughts in order. It doesn't really solve anything specific, but it makes things more clear and that makes them easier to handle.

Anyway, during that time I had been working in a big beautiful Scrap Book journal, but I felt I needed something simpler for that month so I picked a book from my stash that I bought in 2015. This one:

It's a very cool ringbound notebook from the Dutch department store HEMA. It has lined paper and also several pockets and even a ziplocked pocket. My intention was to fill it as much as possible during July, mostly by doing a lot of writing, but I hadn't counted on an injury on my right hand, and of course I also overestimated what a person can do in a month, haha.

Anyway, the Project Book, as I called it, lasted me until September. I never went back to the Scrap Book, and I'm okay with that. That book was becoming too stuffed anyway.

With all the other things I showed you on this blog, this journal was almost forgotten, but I'm here today to play catch up and show you some spreads from the journal that was my steady compantion for about three months this year.

 

 I love how I could put all kinds of loose everyday ephemera into this journal. I now wish I had bought more than one. Since then I haven't seen them at that store again though. I like books with little extra's like this

I finished the Project Book at the end of September and have since moved on to a strictly written journal for a while. I do have plans to create a smash book type of journal for all the imagery and ephemera I collect. I already have the book for it and I have been collecting the images, but I just haven't actually started it yet. It will happen though and when it does I will show you how it looks, promise.

I hope you all enjoyed this peek into another journal of mine and I wish you a wonderful and artsy weekend!

Christmas cards

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas out there (and in here too). I'm still one of those old fashioned people who sends Christmas cards (it seems fewer and fewer people still do that), but it had been a while that I actually made some.

This year however I actually felt like making a few. Only a few mind you, just for fun, not to supply everyone with a Christmas card. In fact I only made twelve. Apparently I'm not a card making machine.

Here they are:

I think they are quite cute and they will go to my closest family and friends and maybe one or two people that I know are really into handmade cards. The rest will get (also very cute) store bought cards.

Maybe next year I should start making these cards in June or something so I actually have enough to send to everybody. ;-)

Wishing you all a wonderful and artsy day. 

A foggy morning

Just some pictures of a lovely half foggy walk I took a short while ago. The mist kept coming in and going out and especially in the forest that really gave a nice silent atmosphere.

Here it still looks sunny...

...but see that low band of 'clouds' on the horizon? That's the fog coming in.

That's not a haze of smoke, that's a layer of mist.

Here's it's creeping into the dunes.

And later in the forest it made everything quiet. No wind, no birds, just silence.

I enjoy my island in just about any kind of weather and I hope you can see why.

Wishing you all a wonderful and artsy day!

From the Morning Book

As the year comes slowly to a close (did I say slowly? this year is racing past!) I am thinking about my morning art practice a lot. Once the current book is full I'm thinking of maybe doing a different theme every month of a different technique. There's plenty of things I want to get into or experiment with and just half an hour a day would be a good way to do that. We'll see what I come up with.

Here are six more pages from the current Morning Book:

All these were done in Faber Castell Pittpens and were started by drawing a simple grid in pencil (except the third one, hence the crooked lines here and there).

I do like my grids this year and I'm nowhere near done playing with them. Of course afterwards I erase the pencil lines as well as I can so the actual pattern stands out more. I just want you to realize I cannot actually draw a straight line. ;-)

Hope you liked the look of these pages and I wish you all a wonderful and artsy day.