Spring shadows

Posting a slightly older painting today. I was browsing back through my sketchbook and found this one, and discovered how much the sun has changed it´s course since the beginning of May. I can see these windows from my home, and this particular wall doesn´t have any tree shadows on it anymore, it´s in the shade almost all day now. Funny how the light changes slowly slowly over the year.

12.5 x 15 cm, watercolours on Fabriano Artistico hot press paper.

Sketchcrawl #19

Today was the 19th International Sketchcrawl (if you haven´t heard of it, check it out here). I didn´t have company for the day, so I went on a solo sketchcrawl. We had showers of rain all day today, so I sketched in the car (which is surprisingly inconvenient if you´re in the driver´s seat, I only sketched as a passenger before).

I drove to an industrial area not too far away from where we live, and since today is a holiday in Sweden (Midsummer´s day) the area was deserted, almost eerie in places.

I find lots of inspiration for drawing in areas like this, odd buildings and vehicles, strange formations of pipes and machinery - if you just move slowly through a place like this, you find things to draw every fifty meters!

I had a great few hours of drawing, in spite of the rain and the lack of company. I´ll definitely try to do next sketchcrawl too. Check out the forums over at www.sketchcrawl.com to see the results of other crawls all over the world!

The drawings are of different sizes, drawn with a Lamy Safari with Noodler´s Lexington Gray ink and watercolours on Fabriano Artistico hot press paper.

Sketchbook project #2

The second sketchbook project I participate in, the Maruman Exchange, is getting off to a good start, and I am really looking forward to having four Maruman folded sketchbooks landing in my mailbox in the next few months.

The participants are Anita Davies in England, Jennifer Lawson and Margaret Storer-Roche in the US, and me in Sweden. We chose to work with the Japanese Maruman accordeon sketchbooks, since they have a neat format and a paper quality we all could agree on would work. We will each fill ten pages in each other´s Marumans, and we´ll be posting scans from our books on the MarumanX blog.

What you see above is two of the first four and a half pages in my own book. I re-opened my box of Kremer pigment watercolours recently, and I used them for these particular pages. These colours are very unlike any other watercolours I´ve worked with, and the first time I tried them I put them away after a while, because I didn´t like the fact that some of the colours are very opaque. I decided to give them a second chance, though, because I like their incredibly strong and saturated pigments, and after doing a few colour mixing charts and tests with them, I am slowly beginning to get the hang of them.

Many of the Kremer watercolours have some mischievous behaviours that I like, such as granulation and biting around the edges of the paint, things you can´t really predict but that brings a lot of movement and life to the paper surface.

I won´t give up on my Winsor & Newtons and Schminckes any time soon, but the Kremer paints are really beautiful, and if you like experimenting with watercolours, these paints will be your Friends.

Good old pencil

It´s been a long time since I picked up a pencil to draw with. I usually go for ink or possibly a light pencil sketch and then watercolours, but yesterday I found one of those cheapo plastic mechanical pencils laying around in the kitchen and got the urge to draw with it. I have this old one-legged doll that my father found under a barn near our summer house years and years ago, a perfect subject for a little evening pencil sketch.

These old dolls are kind of creepy with their eyes closed...

12.5 x 15 cm, pencil on Fabriano Artistico hot press paper.

Archipelago

I went on a short work related trip on a cruise ship across the Baltic sea a few days ago, and managed to capture a glimpse of the Stockholm archipelago in my sketchbook. It was extremely windy, my drawing tools almost blew away, but the view from the sun deck of this enormous ship was amazing, so I had to give it a try.

12.5 x 15 cm, Lamy Safari with Noodler´s Lexington Gray ink and watercolours on Fabriano Artistico hot press paper.

Look, it´s a car!

I am getting more and more time for sketching now (since the summer holidays start in a few days from now), which probably means more frequent posting on this blog too. The last few weeks I have been incredibly busy with work, but now, slowly, a great Calm is beginning to find it´s way into my mind.

Anyway. Cars. I´m still practicing drawing cars every now and then, and this time I think I almost got it. I tried hard with this one not to think that I was drawing a Toyota, I just compared lines and lengths and angles as I do with any other subject I draw, and I think it turned out pretty well. Now I just need to make some more successful car drawings, so I don´t have to draw the conclusion that this was just beginner´s luck...

12 x 12 cm, Micron pen on Fabriano artistico hot press paper.

Sketchbook project #1

I am part of two new exciting sketchbook projects this spring and summer, involving artists from many corners of the world. The first project, Flying Pictures, has just had it´s lift-off during this week. The second one is about to begin, I will tell you more about it as soon as it has started.

In the Flying Pictures project, seven handmade concertina sketchbooks has been sent from their owners/makers to travel around the world. They will make seven stops along the way, where the participating artists will fill the books with more pages and their own artwork. This way, the books will grow along the way, and hopefully take on a form of their own. I have no idea what my book will look like when it returns to me, which is of course what makes this whole project so thrilling to participate in.

My book, called Polychromatic Behaviour (front cover and part of first page posted here), left home this weekend, and so I have joined the other participants in worrying about what will happen to the book along the way. I think I speak for all of us when I say that I´m not at all worried about the time it will spend with the other artists involved, but rather what will happen to it in the hands of the postal services of all the countries it will pass on it´s way...