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.

Colored pencil gradients in my black book

I started a black papered dotted journal/sketchbook a while back and it is very interesting to  play in it with different materials. After doing a few patterns in gel pen I decided to try some colored pencil.

I have the full set of 120 polychromos from Faber Castell and I love playing with the gradients of the colors as they appear in the box. So I did a few spreads just following the order as they are presented by the manufacturer. It was also a good way to test every color on black paper.

The effect of colored pencil on black paper is really beautiful, but also very difficult to photograph correctly. At least the pictures give an impression of the reality of it, but in real life it is actually even more lovely.

In any case working in this book is interesting and I look forward to exploring and experimenting with it further. 

Hope you are changing things up from time to time and wishing your a wonderful and artsy day. 

Around here lately

Time for another selection of everyday pictures from my everyday life as seen through my eyes and my camera phone.

A lonely hollyhock in our main street.

Signs of autumn.

After a year of saving I splurged on an iPad pro! Damn, those things are expensive! But I love it!

Less of a splurge, but still lovely, new slippers.

My journal kit for going on vacation at the beginning of October.

A Sunday morning, a cat and a magazine, what more do you need?

Picking out inks for fall journaling.

A very dark morning begged me to light all my candles.

When you can't sleep because your thoughts are driving you crazy.

Waiting time put to good use by sitting in the library in Leeuwarden. It used to be a prison!

I took part in a three day workshop program that was put up to make up for the huge craft supply fair Kreadoe not happening this year. It was fun, but I hope next year sister and I can go again.

Early for a cancer checkup, so I sat in the sun for a while. This is the train station of Leeuwarden. All was well by the way. Next check up in February.

The supervisor at work in the early morning.

Life is good in general, but I have to admit that sometimes corona measures are starting to annoy me. I would like to go on day trips again, visit family and friends, go shopping for fun instead of necessities, and just feel a little less confined. But then again I am lucky to live on an island with lots of nature and space to be outside and all my needs are basically met. And of course I'm also lucky that so far corona itself has not found me or my loved ones. It could be worse. 

Hope you are all doing okay in your neck of the woods and that you are managing to keep appreciating the good stuff. Wishing you a wonderful and artsy day.