An accidental giveaway

A little while ago I bought this cute sticker book made by Carpe Diem which looked like it was fun and just up my ally.

When I got home I realised I should have looked better at the full content instead of just the pretty colours and pictures and words like 'inspire', because it turned out to be very much about God and faith and Jesus, and well...I'm just not really that religious. I could probably use half the stickers and the rest would just remain unused, which seemed a bit wasteful.

But I know there are plenty among you who are of the more religious persuasion that would probably love to own this sticker book and it's a lot nicer to have somebody else use the whole thing instead of me just using half of it. So ... I've decided to do a giveaway, a sort of accidental giveaway, haha.

Here's a peek at some of the pages in the book:

There are twelve pages in total and 703 stickers, but you get the idea. They are very cute and pretty and I think they would make someone very happy.

If you would like to win this sticker book just leave a comment. I will post a winner on September 9th, so be sure to comment before then. The winner will then have a week to get in touch with me and if they don't I will simply pick another winner. I sure hope these stickers will bring joy to one of you.

Wishing you all a wonderful and artsy day!

A peek in the Leuchtturm (my current journal)

My current (and new to you) journal is an A5 sized Leuchtturm1917 dotted notebook, and I love it. It makes up for all the trouble I had with my previous journal which I sort of abandoned two thirds of the way because I hated the paper with a growing passion.

The paper in the Leuchtturm is smooth and moderately thin, but it doesn't bleed or feather and it loves to be written on with fountain pens and felttip pens, so I can finally get back to those without worrying about seeing the ink bleed through to the other side. There is also something about the size and format that I really like, but find harder to explain. It's a very compact book. It's a book that feels like a book, if that makes any sense.

I love spending time in this book and am drawn to it in a way that I have not been drawn to a journal in quite a while. You can tell this simply by the fact that I have been using it for five weeks and am already almost halfway (the book has about 250 pages!) and also because I have been drawing in it.

Anyway, I thought I would show you a peek in this current journal, so here we go:

The book comes with index pages which I am using for pen tests.

Now the paper in this book is not really suitable for wet media, so if you like to play with watercolour or mixed media in your journal I would not recommend this one. But Leuchtturm makes very nice sketchbooks. I used a pocket sized one to be my travel journal last yeat, which you can see here and here. That has a very different type of paper, made for arting.

For me however this regular notebook is perfect and I'm actually contemplating buying another one to follow up this journal when it's finished, but I'll wait a litte before I make that decision, since my journaling taste likes a lot of variation.

I hope you liked this peek in my journal and I wish you all a wonderful and artsy day.

Morning Portraits

As I am writing this (which is a few days before this post gets published) I still have only two more portraits to go in my current morning art project. Now that I'm back to doing my morning art every day it goes really fast.

I am enjoying these portraits very  much, especially doing them in multicoloured pencil. I never really just sketched with coloured pencil before so it's an interesting experience.

Here are portraits number 21 to 26, as always they are mailorder catalogue girls.

So while I'm closing in on the end of this project, I am trying to think of what to do next and I haven't decided yet. I have so many options I would like to try and also some that kind of intimidate me.
For instance I would like to do a series of landscapes in gouache, but I absolutely suck at landscapes, so it's scary to do. I'm also thinking of doing botanicals in coloured pencil, which would also be very challenging.

But then again, it's the practice that I'm doing this for in the first place. Trying new or difficult things should be part of that. I'll just think on it a bit more and let you know. If you have any suggestions I would love to read them in the comments.

For now I wish you all a wonderful and artsy day.

Grid Patience

Whenever I post or show my grid drawings, someone is bound to say sooner or later that I must be a very patient person. Well...I am, but only when it comes to grid drawings or patterns! It is a total mystery to me how I can hardly bring up the effort to do a simple sketch from life in say fifteen minutes, but have no problem at all spending hours on a page in one of my grid or pattern books.

I can think of no other reason than that it is meditative. It calms my mind, stills my busy thoughts. Regular drawing (like with my current morning portraits) always makes me a little restless. Maybe because it has to be something. My patterns and grids don't have to be anything, just colour and shapes. Maybe I draw them the way other people colour in adult colouring books.

In the end the why of it doesn't really matter. It's just what I love to do and when you love to do something you make time for it.

Here are some grid drawings from my Moleskine XL squared soft cover book:

Still, all these drawings are an exercise in patience, even for someone who loves doing them. Some are spread out over the course of a week in different sessions of a little time here and there, some I can do in a day in a big session of several hours, but in any case they take time, escpecially the bigger ones like these and to me they are worth it.

Hope you are spending your precious time doing something you love and wishing you a wonderful and artsy weekend!

Art in the Journal

Recently I told you about the trouble I was having with my previous journal, a B6 traveler's notebook, mostly because of the inserts I had purchased for it and their crappy paper.  So I closed that book prematurely and moved on to another journal and I couldn't be happier.

One of the ways I can tell I'm happy with a journal is that I take it with me everywhere and also do some art in it from time to time. My current journal is a Leuchtturm1917 dotted notebook and I will tell you more about it and why I like it so much in another post, but for now I just wanted to show some of the drawings I did in it. You see the paper is absolutely made for my felt tip pens and I just can't resist doing pattern type drawings in it and then colouring them in, especially after notebooks that just bled through so easily that I didn't bother with anything like that.

So here are some of the more artsy excerpts from my current journal:

All these were done in Stabilo 68 pens, my favorite felt tip pens. I take this book with me everywhere, so that's basically where I work in it too. On the ferry, on my walks, at my lunchbreak at work, having a coffee in restaurants or just at home.

In a future post I will show you some of the regular spreads in this journal and tell you more about it. For now I just want to wish you a wonderful and artsy day.

Morning Portraits

Even though I have been doing morning art for about two and a half years, it still remains a process and I'm always learning new things. For instance, a while ago I wrote about wanting to skip it on my workdays (only three days a week) because it was costing me precious sleep.

From time to time I skip a day or so anyway, so it didn't seem like such a big deal, but it was. Turns out that when I don't at least intend to do it every day the whole habit of it just kind of blows up in my face. By that I mean that I didn't do my morning art at all, not even on the days when I did have the time!

Also I noticed that I missed the routine of it. After doing this for such a long time it seems my mind/body/system (or whatever is affected by these things) felt completely unbalanced without it. Kind of like I feel when I don't journal for a while. Apparently this whole morning art thing has become 'something I do' and when I don't, it bugs me. In any case, I did not like it.

For some reason it is hard for me to have a habit that I only keep up several days a week. I have to do it every day, or at least have the intention to do it on a daily basis. Now I have always skipped on vacations and sometimes for practical reasons, but never as part of the routine, if that makes any sense. Vacations for instance are all about getting out of your regular routines so that doesn't bother me at all.

So after about two weeks of trying to start my day without it, I got back to it and yes, that again means that three days a week I have to get up at five in the morning. I hate getting up at five in the morning! But I hate not doing my morning art even more. Sigh....

All this is a very long intro into five more portraits that I finished recently. Here are portraits number 16 to 20.

Just the other day I was curious as to how many days I have actually done morning art over the past years, so I started adding up and I came to around 720! Like I said I don't do them on vacations, I don't do them when I have the flu or when I'm away from home and last year I took a hiatus of an entire month for personal reasons, but still...720 is a big number in my book and I'm quite proud of it.

It's interesting that it's a bit hard for me sometimes to explain why I do this morning art thing in the first place, but that it's something I really miss when I don't do it. I guess in the end it's just a rewarding thing to start your day with a bit of creativity.

Hope you are doing something rewarding in your neck of the woods and wishing you a wonderful and artsy day!