Some free colouring pages for you!

Today I have a few freebies for you to enjoy. I often get comments like "you should do a colouring book" and even though it's flattering that some of you think so and it's a nice idea in theory, I think the work and  monetary investment involved would not be good for me and just cause me a lot of stress. I just like to draw and doodle, that's all.

But...I do listen to my online people and there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to enjoy a bit of colouring every now and then, so I will make some colouring pages from time to time for you to print out, free of charge for you and fee of hassle for me. ;-)

I have three for you today, all based on drawings I did during my Morning Art (but all a bit different from that too, I don't care for copying, not even from myself!).

All you have to do is click on the image you want. It will lead you to my flickr page and there you can directly download it in different sizes and thus print it on the paper of your preference. The download button  on flickr is on the bottom right of the screen. All drawings are originally A4 in size and scanned at 300 dpi.

I hope you will enjoy colouring these doodles in and if you do I would love to see them!  Also, feel free to share them with others and spread the joy. I will be colouring these in too of course and share the result in a future post. It's downright impossible for me to leave one of my own doodle drawings uncoloured since the earth might tilt on its axis if I do. ;-)

Wishing you all a wonderful and colourful artsy day!

Doodle drawing process

The cool thing about having a morning art practice of just 30 minutes at a time is that you can really see how a drawing progresses. It also makes more clear how long a certain type of drawing (or painting for that matter) really takes.

Today I thought I might show you the progress of a doodle drawing that I did recently in my journal. I especially like showing this one because I pretty much hated it when I started it and loved it when it was finished. So don't give up before you're done, there's ugly stages in every piece of art (even if you are the only one who notices, haha).

The differences in colour between the pictures have to do with different lighting circumstances every morning depending on the weather and the hour.

The closer I got to finishing this page the more I started to like it. Looking back I think my dislike in the beginning had more to do with me feeling rusty at doing these type of doodles than with the actual drawing itself. It's hard to be objective about your own art, because it always comes with the feelings and doubts and pleasures you had while making it. A viewer only sees the end product and may love or hate it because of their own subjective feelings, doubts and pleasures.
I guess what I'm trying to say is: don't be too dismissive of your own art too soon, you never know who might love it. ;-)

If you want to follow my daily progress of morning art you can do so on my Instagram or Facebook page where I post (almost) every morning.

Wishing you all a wonderful and artsy weekend!

Pattern Variations

I am still very much in love with working with grids. I often draw them myself, but the easiest way to do it is to just use a book with a preprinted grid on it. One of the books I use for this is a Moleskine XL squared notebook. I mostly use it to try out pattern variations as I call them.

Here are some pages from this book:

If you want to drive yourself insane, try something like this! ;-)

Even though I like the full pages, I think I still prefer the ones with several patterns in the same colour combination.

By working in this book I feel like I'm collecting my own personal pattern library and it amazes me how even after filling quite a lot of pages in it I am nowhere near done with playing with grids. I think it may be an addiction I will never get rid off.

Hope you are addicted to something wonderful in your part of the world and wishing you a wonderful and artsy day!

Art in the Morning

In 2015 I started a daily morning art practice. I called this Morning Paintings and it was exactly as it sounds: one painting every morning. In 2016 I tweaked this morning practice into doing half an hour of art in a special sketchbook. That way I could work longer on a drawing/painting if I wanted to and didn't have to stress about finishing a page a day. This way I filled what I called the Morning Book. Purely coincidentally the endinig of that book coincided with the end of the year, this was not planned. But it meant I had to think again about what I would do in 2017. One thing I did know is that I loved doing art in the morning before the rest of the day started and that I wanted to continue this practice.

Basically for 2017 I have simply one rule: make art as often as possible for 30 minutes in the morning. The way I am currently doing that is by integrating  it into my journal, but I already have ideas of doing it on seperate sheets or starting up a second Morning Book. In the end the format doesn't matter as much anymore as the fact that I keep up my morning art practice, so for now I am simply calling it Art in the Morning or Morning Art. I think the only other rule I have is that these art pieces/drawings only get worked on in the morning and are fully separate from any other artwork I might do.

So here are some pages I have done so far this year:

As stated above these are done in my current journal, which is a Seawhite of Brighton sketchbook of about 20x20 cm (8x8 inches). I cannot say enough good things about these sketchbooks, they have been my favourite for years, but I had not worked in one for a while and now I'm back into one I remember how spoiled I was. The paper is the most allround paper I have ever come across in a sketchbook. If I didn't like variation so much I might only work in these.

Integrating this morning practice into my journal makes my journal more interesting I think, but it is also practically a bit difficult to get used to. This has to do with the fact that I do the Morning Art in my studio upstairs and my journaling at my kitchen table/journaling table downstairs. So often you can find me cursing because I have to walk either down or up because I forgot to bring the book. ;-) This is one of the reasons that I might take the Morning Art out of the journal again when this book is filled up. We'll see how it goes.

Hope you are experimenting with some artsy practice wherever you are and wishing you a wonderful and artsy day!

Schiermonnikoog - part four of four

In January I went on vacation to the smallest inhabited Dutch Wadden Island, Schiermonnikoog. 

I had a wonderful time. Even more so because there was a lot of winter to be had and I love me some winter!

As always I took a lot of pictures and this four part series is a photographic impression of a beautiful island that is almost as close to my heart as my own. 

I'll let the pictures speak for themselves, but if you have any questions about them or the island itself, please don't hesitate to ask. 

Hope you enjoy!

Schiermonnikoog - part three of four

In January I went on vacation to the smallest inhabited Dutch Wadden Island, Schiermonnikoog. 

I had a wonderful time. Even more so because there was a lot of winter to be had and I love me some winter!

As always I took a lot of pictures and this four part series is a photographic impression of a beautiful island that is almost as close to my heart as my own. 

I'll let the pictures speak for themselves, but if you have any questions about them or the island itself, please don't hesitate to ask. 

Hope you enjoy!