Getting messy

I´ve decided to go out of my comfort zone even more these last few drawings of my December challenge (to draw from imagination every day). I am going to try a few landscapes in a very limited palette, plus I´ll be working with Neocolor II crayons dipped in water to try to avoid my usual controlled details.

I chose five light colours today, plus white, which made it kind of hard to achieve any real contrasts, but since the colours are very different from each other I thought I´d be able to get a feeling of light and shadow anyway. Sadly, the blue turned into green everywhere, since I didn´t manage to keep it clean from the yellow and yellow ochre, but I liked the exercise anyway.

I particularly like that this is more like painting than drawing. A Neocolor II crayon dipped in water gets very blunt after a while, so you have to lay down the colours in patches rather than lines, and you feel like you´re painting with a huge brush rather than drawing with a crayon. I also like the feeling of these crayons when wet, it´s like smearing melted butter. :)

15 x 20,5 cm, light grey Pitt brush pen and Neocolor II crayons on drawing paper.

Tired of the reindeer?

I didn´t know Santa´s sailing to get around these days, but here he is. He turned up on the page as I was drawing, don´t know where he came from, don´t know where he´s going.

I know the streamer is going one way, and the sail another, and the waves a third, but who said you have to be logical when you draw?

15 x 20,5 cm, Pitt brush pens on drawing paper.

Faces

I didn´t draw much during Christmas, with all the socializing going on these days. I had this page going on for some days, and finished it yesterday.

Going back to socializing a bit more now. :)

15 x 20,5 cm, Lamy Safari with Noodler´s black ink on drawing paper.

Next 14-page sketchbook

I haven´t had time at all for drawing during the last two days, but this evening I finally grabbed the other 14-page sketchbook and a pencil and just doodled while watching TV. I HATE hard pencils. This was drawn with an extremely hard mechanical pencil, must have been at least... 27H or something, there´s absolutely no black in the picture!

It will be exciting to see if I manage to fill this book too before the end of December, since I have missed a few days. No big deal, really, if I don´t, but I´m going to try.

15 x 20,5 cm, pencil on paper.

Last page of first December sketchbook

When I started this December challenge of drawing something from imagination every day, I made two 14-page sketchbooks especially for this month. This drawing is the last page of the first of those folded books. Don´t know who it is, I just drew this face as an excuse to play with patterns and colour.

I thought I´d show you what the sketchbook itself looks like:

And, if you unfold it (it´s made by one single big sheet of paper), it looks like this:

I´ve been thinking that this would be a great way to fold, say, a watercolour paper if you´d like to make a bunch of smaller paintings during a journey, for example. It makes a sketchbook that´s easy to carry around, has fourteen pages, and when you unfold it, the paper is painted only on one side - i.e. you could easily cut loose the single paintings and frame them or send them as postcards or just... fold paper planes with them or whatever. :)

15 x 20,5 (x a bunch, to get the size of the large sheet of paper...), pencil and watercolour on drawing paper.

Pencil - now with colour!

I decided to try one more of these, but add a bit of colour. Don´t know if I think the colour actually added anything, it got a bit messy.

Just for the fun of it, I took some snapshots while doing this. You´ll have to excuse the crappy quality of the images. The photos were taken under a tiny table lamp, which doesn´t do artwork any justice, and I didn´t lay much time on fixing them in Photoshop...



















20,5 x 15 cm, pencil and gouache on drawing paper.

More pencil

I had to try this again. I think this one turned out a bit too controlled compared to the one in the previous post, but it was still fun to do.

15 x 20,5 cm, pencil on paper.

Paint with pencils

I don´t know if you can call this a painting, but I tried to treat the pencil as a brush instead of a drawing instrument in this, to see what happened. And well... this is what happened.

15 x 20,5 cm, pencil on paper.

Doodling During the Day

I drew this now and then during the day, with nothing particular in mind. I kind of like these untamed, no-composition, no-meaning doodles, I often get good ideas from them for paintings or other drawings. It works best to do them while the brain is busy doing other stuff, such as sitting in a meeting, listening to radio, talking on the phone...

20,5 x 15 cm, pencil, Lamy Safari with Noodler´s Black, Faber-Castell Pitt brush pen on drawing paper.

Drawing again

The Christmas cards are finished, so I´m back to drawing in my sketchbook. I´m actually starting to itch for some of my ordinary drawing habits, i.e. not drawing from my imagination so much, but I´m going to stick to this for December. I feel that it´s doing me good, not depicting stuff but actually making it up instead. It´s way out of my comfort zone, and I think that´s good.

I don´t know what it is with all these people with the eyes far apart. They don´t look much like the doodles I make when I´m not actually concentrating to doodle. They must be smart, there´s gotta be lots of space for brains in there...

This was actually drawn today, not on the 10 of December as it says on the drawing. I am totally lost in time, which is kind of strange, because I KNOW that I have written today´s date (the 11th) on lots of papers at work today. The Brain works in mysterious ways...

20,5 x 15 cm, pencil, Lamy Safari with Noodler´s Lexington gray ink, and watercolours on paper that doesn´t take as many layers of watercolours that I want to force it to.

Christmas preparations

I did a different take on the imagination drawing thing here. I took one day off the sketchbook plan, to make my Christmas cards. I figured since those are drawn from imagination too, they kind of fit into this December scheme of mine, even if they don´t end up in the sketchbook.

I make a batch of Christmas cards every year, and I used to make them with lino cuts, but I grew kind of tired of printing so many, since I don´t have a press. Lino cuts are fun to make, as long as you don´t have to make over 40 copies by hand... The last few years I have used stencils and Copic Airbrush instead. It´s an easy and fun (though not very cheap) way of multiplying an image.

What got me started with stencils in the beginning was the street artwork of such amazing artists as Banksy and Shepard Fairey and others (see links for inspiration below). With spray cans and stencils you can make amazing stuff, but it´s not very practical for making a few cards, what with the solvents and smell and all, so the Copic airbrush is a good replacement for the spray cans. You get kind of the same grainy spray results.

I usually make some tiny thumbnail sketches first, trying out different compositions. When I´m satisfied, I make a more finished drawing of the motif, in it´s right size, and then I trace it on to plastic films to make the stencils - one film for each colour. Then comes the most boring part - cutting out the stencils. It takes some time and patience to get a good result here, but once you´re done you enter the fun zone. Now you just spray away and the finished cards start piling up!

For some nice stencil inspiration, check out
Shepard Fairey
Logan Hicks
Banksy
or check out the Off the streets gallery over at Stencil Revolution.

9 x 16 cm, Copic Airbrush on card stock.

Alien models?

I´m guessing a Star Trek fashion show. What do you think?

...I´m pretty sure men in white coats will come to take care of me now...

21,5 x 15 cm, Lamy Safari with Noodler´s Black, Black Faber-Castell Pitt brush pen and pencil on drawing paper.

I´m sure he´s a gangster

I don´t know him, he just turned up on my paper, but I´m sure he´s up to no good. And I also think he´s a ladies´ man. A heartbreaker.

15 x 20,5 cm, gray Faber-Castell Pitt brush pen, and two Lamy Safaris with Noodler´s Black and Noodler´s Lexington Gray in a cheap homemade folded sketchbook.

Day six - Portrait

Felt like doing a portrait today, sort of like a Mona-Lisa. I don´t mean to say that this is anything like La Gioconda, only that I was a bit inspired by her. You know, an attractive chic with a strange smile and a landscape in the background. :)

15 x 20,5 cm, pencil and watercolours on same useless drawing paper as yesterday and the day before that and...

That tree again

Uhm... well, I don´t have much to say about this. I just kind of liked the tree from yesterday, and decided to let it grow.

15 x 20,5 cm, Lamy Safari with Noodler´s Lexington Gray ink, pencil and watercolours in very cheap sketchbook.

A bit scattered

I didn´t have much time to draw today, and no real good ideas either, so I just doodled every now and then, and I started on something new each time. Strangely enough, the fuller the page got, the more ideas I got, and I couldn´t fit them all in in the end. So now I know what to do every time I feel a bit uninspired - just draw! If I had kept going here, who knows, maybe something great would have turned up eventually! :)

20,5 x 15 cm, pencil, Lamy Safari with Noodler´s Lexington Gray ink, watercolours and white gel pen on drawing paper.

Third day of December challenge

Today a bunch of cartoony kids popped out of a whiteboard marker that I happened to hold in my hand. Afterwards, the Lamy Safari felt like adding some details, so I let it.

20,5 x 15 cm, whiteboard marker and Lamy Safari with Noodler´s Black ink on some drawing paper.

Miss Darkness

Who the **** ruined this page for me?! I was just innocently going to do my second drawing from imagination here, when something happened. My hand and the old Fibracolor pens that I found in a drawer today just went berserk.

She looks kind of hairy too, with all that hatching... yikes.

20,5 x 15 cm. Fibracolor pens, pencil and watercolours on crap paper.

Doodles in December

In my art plan for 2007 I stated that I wanted to draw more from imagination instead of just depicting stuff, but did I? Nope. Almost nothing. And that is not good, since 2007 is drawing to it´s end. So I decided to do something about it.

I have given myself the challenge of making one drawing from imagination every day in December. I made two simple, easy, cheap sketchbooks especially for this, folded from one piece of huge paper each. They´ve got 14 pages in them. Of course that makes 28 pages only, which I couldn´t help, since the way you fold these thingies only gives you 14 pages. So since December has 31 days, I have the possibility of giving myself some slack three days. Might come in handy. :)

Feel free to join me in this - imagination is fun, and I for one could use some more of it!

20,5 x 15 cm, pencil and watercolours in cheapo sketchbook.