Holiday wishes

 MAY     YOUR     HOLIDAYS    BE

AS    RELAXED    AS    THIS    SEAL

Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas and all that's good to you and yours. May you end this insane year with a bit of calm and relaxation, lots of love and warmth and a great deal of laughter, no matter how you spend it or whatever you do or don't celebrate. Take care of yourself.

I will be away from the blog until January because of a little christmas vacation without any plans, which just sounds lovely to me. See you next year and until then have yourselves a wonderful and artsy time!

A bit of cuteness on the beach

Every winter we find ourselves with some seals on our beach or coastline. The seals in our region give birth in winter and sometimes the mothers get stuck on our coast and then can't go back to their regular home (a sand plate some miles off the island) until their young are strong enough to take care of themselves. 

This gives us islanders and our guests the wonderful opportunity to see seal pups and their elders up close, although when I say up close I mean "Keep your distance and keep it well!". Social distancing was required in the company of seals way before covid-19. Getting too close gives them stress and may even cause mothers to abandon their young, but it can also be dangerous. These seal mums are not to be trifled with. Even the young have been known to bite unsuspecting tourists! People tend to forget seals are predators and not cuddly toys. 

Anyway, we are having seals on our beach again, so I went out and took some pics for you:

Before you think I broke the rules by hanging over these seals myself: I used a zoomcamera that can bring things 20x closer, and even then had to crop the images to bring them close enough to really get a look at them. 

I will definitely try to see them more often the coming weeks, it such a special privilege to have them here. 

Hope you are enjoying some form of wildlife wherever you are and wishing you a wonderfull and artsy day. 

 

A christmassy quartet

With the holidays coming up I decided to do some patterns in a more Christmas inspired palette. So I made a quartet (four patterns) on the iPad with a textured digital brush and chose some reds and greens to play with.

Here's the result:

The brush I used is called 'dry brush', but I find it looks more like a juicy wax crayon. I like the look of these very much myself and I hope you do too. 

Hope you are all getting in the Christmas mood and wishing you a wonderful and artsy day.

Walking Pictures

 Just some photographs from my walks.

Most of these were taken in September, when fall hadn't really settled in yet. In the last pic you can see that the leaves were starting to fall a little on the forest floor. Right now the leafy trees are a lot less leafy, but that's for another post.

Wishing you all a wonderful and artsy day.

Five related patterns on the iPad

I like to work in small series on the iPad. Usually four that form a set, but today I bring you five with the same color palette and digital brushes. 

All have the same texture layer with a splatter pattern over them. That's one of the fun things about working digitally, you can add texture and play with different layers over each other to create different effects. 

I will often put together a color palette based on one of my own photographs. That's another fun thing you can do in Procreate, just pull the colors directly from images you like. 

The picture I used for this palette was this one:

I like the idea that there is a link between my art and my walks this way, even though it isn't directly obvious. Now there is just a tiny spec of my island in my drawings, no matter how abstract.

Hope you enjoy playing with color in some way too and wishing you a wonderful and artsy day.