Bookbinding

These are a few images from the bookbinding class I taught last weekend. I didn´t have time to take many photographs myself, so most of these were captured by Anne Majakari who was both a participant in and an organizer of the course. If you check out her site, be sure to click the link "fotodgb" to have a look at her fantastic photo diary, and don´t miss the little plus-minus sign to the right, where you will find more images with text both in English and Swedish.

During this course all participants made two books, one case bound and one with coptic binding. We also did some marbled papers for end papers, which was incredibly fun!

I don´t think I ever saw such enthusiastic class participants anywhere, ever. Everybody worked constantly from 10 am to 8 pm on Saturday, and then started again around 9 am Sunday morning and worked all day. The whole weekend was all about bookbinding and sketchbooks, and it was so good to share some time with people who are all into inks, pens, paper, sketching and drawing. We even ended our dinner on Saturday night with a really geeky Noodler´s ink session, trying out all kinds of drawing tools and ink colours on large papers... Wonderful.

The books turned out beautifully, and I think everybody was happy with their books. I also think they all slept very well when they got home...

I want to send out a great THANK YOU to all the participants in the course, you really made my day (well, weekend), and special hugs to Anne and Christina who put in a huge amount of work to organize everything so well.

Springtime

Today I finally got a chance to draw these little fellas, I´ve been wanting to for at least a week. I thought it was about time to have some spring here on the blog.

The reason for the lack of updates here lately is that I´ve been preparing for a little course I´m giving this weekend. Some sweet people have invited me to a place near Örebro to show them how I make my sketchbooks. Who can say no to something like that? Sketchbooking should always be encouraged, as much as possible, don´t you think? :)

12.5 x 12.5, Lamy Safari with Noodler´s Lexington gray ink and watercolours on Arches Satinée watercolour paper.

Spring day #2

Drawing no. 2 from Saturday´s little personal sketch-/photocrawl around Kungsholmen in Stockholm.

12,5 x 15 cm, Lamy Safari with Noodler´s Lexington gray ink and watercolours on Arches Satinée watercolour paper.

Springday

Spring is back in Stockholm again, and the sun is playing hide and seek with the shadows among the buildings in town. Yesterday me and my friend Carina (check out her beautiful work here) decided to go out and make some pictures. I brought my drawing gear, of course, and she had her camera ready. We chose a part of town where we seldom go, and I parked myself on a bench in the sun, drawing, while she walked around and took some pics and came around my bench every now and then. It was a really nice day. My fingers got incredibly cold, though, in spite of the sun, so I only managed to do two sketches. (The other one will be posted soon.)

As always, the cars look a bit off. Cars really are my worst nightmare when it comes to drawing. But I figure I´ll never learn if I don´t give them a try, so I didn´t exclude them out of the picture here, for once.

12 x 15 cm, Micron pen and watercolours on Fabriano Artistico hot press paper.

Old portraits and an ink surprise

The old yearbook that I took apart and filled with splendid drawing paper (see earlier post) used to be full of photographs from 1936 - portraits of teachers and students of The Royal Institute of Technology here in Stockholm. At first, I was just going to throw the whole contents of the book away, but then I started really looking at these photos, and they grew on me. I quite like them. All these men (of course only men were studying to become engineers in 1936) have quite a character to their faces, and even the young students look like gentlemen quite experienced in the ways of the world to my eyes of 2008.

I drew these with a Micron pen, and two waterbrushes filled with diluted Noodler´s ink. A funny thing I discovered (that I probably should have known, since I once cleaned a dried up ink pen by simply soaking it in ink for a few days) is that when I was laying down the washes of ink, the wash solved the pen lines! And Microns are waterproof, and the lines were dry. It took me a while to realize that ink solves ink if they are of a similar kind.

You see how the first guy above has very dark shadows? I drew him first and was incredibly frustrated with the lines getting all mushed up. So I started experimenting with other ways of filling my waterbrushes with shades of gray. Ended up with two different mixes of Neutral Tint watercolour and water. That did the trick. Now I can get pretty much the grays that are in the photos.

I´m not sure why I´m drawing these, but they are quite addictive. Now I´d just like to find a book full of women from the same era.

5,5 x 8 cm, Micron pens and diluted ink/watercolour on Arches Satinée watercolour paper.