Tellus Cykel & Motor

This little shop is just two minutes from my home, and I´ve been wanting to draw it for I don´t know how long. It´s got such a classical looking store front, with the letters and the windows in style with the rest of the building (a lady passing by told me it was built 1910), and it´s also the best bicycle store in Stockholm (in my opinion, and no, they didn´t pay me to say that, they don´t even know I posted this). The guys working there are real pros, doing quality work, selling quality bikes and as the smaller sign to the right says - giving real SERVICE to their customers, something that is getting as unusual these days as their goodlooking store front...

Patty´s Drawing Grid Challenge

Patty over at The Drawing Club posted a drawing grid a while ago (see here) and asked if anyone was interested in joining her in drawing more grids. I did, and this is the result. I liked doing this, it was actually quite easy to fill this grid (the idea was to fill it in one sitting) instead of doing one drawing on a whole page in my sketchbook. It´s not threatening at all to fill one small rectangle on the paper with a tiny drawing, while at times, on a bad day, it can feel like an enormous job to fill a page. I don´t think this will become my new daily drawing habit, but I will certainly do this every now and then to practice some composition and just get my hand going on a bad drawing day.

This grid was filled on the same day as the previous drawing below - the one that drove me mad. The grid was a joy to draw after that one, but I did have a hard time finding subjects for all those little squares. I´ll say it again - pine forests just aren´t my kind of environment.

Compulsive drawing

I spent most of yesterday outside in a forest. My students had an outdoor day, practicing orienteering. I sat by one of the controls in a deep pine forest and of course I used my time out there for drawing.

I know many artists find a lot of inspiration among tall trees out in the wild, and I enjoy drawing landscapes on the whole, but pine forests... I don´t know, they make me feel a bit claustrophobic. I mean, I like picking berries, mushrooms, or just walking around in them, but when it comes to drawing I suddenly feel like the old saying (at least in Sweden) "I can´t see the forest for all the trees".

I kind of forced myself to just sit down and draw what´s in front of me. Pine-trees. How inspiring. They are so... vertical. All of them. I couldn´t seem to find any interesting rhythms to capture on paper, and no intriguing compositions either, so I just started drawing one tree - any tree in the bunch, really - and worked on from there. After a while I kind of got the idea that if nothing else, I could at least try to get the values right. The tree-trunks were darker than the background, but lighter towards the top, so I started working with short strokes of my dip-pen to make light and dark. And man, did I regret that before I was done. I think this drawing took me an hour and a half, at least. It´s 13.5x19.5 cm of tiny ink-marks, and it almost drove me crazy.

Now that it´s done, I kind of like it, though. I can actually see a rhythm in it now, AND I like the composition. It was worth it, after all, but I hate this kind of detailed, time-consuming way of drawing. Not looking at it, but doing it. I hate it because once I´ve started something like this, I can´t stop until it´s finished, I get caught in this obsessive drawing behavior, and by the time it´s done I´m exhausted and a bit angry because I even got the idea to start something so tedious...

Still, this drawing fills it´s space well. It´s on the first page of my new sketchbook, and it´s always a good feeling to fill that first page...

Survivor rose

"How to paint flowers in watercolors" is not a favourite book title in my world - I´m not really into this botanical thing. Sure, flowers are great, I like having them around, I just don´t draw them very often.

Now, this rose is another story. It grows right outside the door of our apartment building. We are in the midst of a big renovation (yes, I know I mentioned it like a hundred years ago and they´re still working on it) and our apartment is finished but outside still looks like a dump.

In the middle of all that junk and dust and noise and ugliness, just to the left when you exit our building, there´s a tiny part of a flower bed that survived excavators and cranes and ladders and rough boots. And right there, a few inches from the door, is this grand yellow rose. It´s been shining there for quite some time now, it even survived the roe deers that tend to come around early mornings to eat rosebuds.

It got to me. How could I not sit down in front of this fighter and draw it?

Kitchen window

I just realized I had two more watercolor paintings from july scanned and ready for posting, and it´s about time I put them on my blog now.

This is the kitchen window of our summer house - or rather, MY kitchen window. There are two more kitchens in the house, but this is the one where I sit and have my morning cups of tea during summertime.

Paintingwise, this was a tricky subject. First of all, panes of glass are always hard. They reflect a lot of what´s on the outside, but at the same time you see through them too. So I had to paint both reflections and interior at the same time. Don´t know if I´m really happy with the result. And then the wall. I never really got the hang of painting brick walls. They become too boring (at least in my humble opinion) if you try to paint them exactly as they look, but you can´t really avoid those bricks either, or try to cheat by just painting the color but no bricks. I tried to find some kind of middle course by doing both, or half of each, or whatever... I skipped some of the bricks and tried to find the right colors.

Last but not least, the cherries from the garden behind the house. I´m not too thrilled about painting still lives, but these were lying on the table for some reason and I thought I´d give those red colors a try. Though afterwards, what I like most about this painting, are the blue color stains. I like it when a figurative painting is a mix of a) a subject looking like it fills a 3D space and b) a physical flat surface that makes paint spatter around if you drop it. To me, that´s part of the magic of figurative painting - trying to capture what you see, and still letting the materials show.

Drawing Contact

I took a walk in my neighbourhood this afternoon, with the sole purpose of filling a spread in my Moleskine before I returned home. During this stroll I drew my first real-time live portrait of a bird - a hungry little jackdaw. He (or she?) was very disappointed by the fact that my drawing gear wasn´t eatable, but kept walking around in front of me. Just in case.

Drawing this I was approached by a young man who asked politely if I minded him looking, and it turned out he was an industrial designer from Mexico, here to visit the University of Arts, Crafts and Design - where I got my degree. We had a nice conversation about drawing habits. He was more of the marker type, making nice designs to show a prospective customer, while I´m more the Lamy Safari and watercolors type, drawing just because.

We talked for a little while, and then we parted, no big deal. But hey, isn´t that nice, though? Drawing is probably as contact generating as dogs or toddlers. Only without the little black plastic bags or diapers.

(Another piece of the filled spread is posted over at The Drawing Club.)

In town

Back after my vacation, I had to go for a walk through town the other day and draw a few scenes, breathing some exhaust fumes and feeling at home. Among other things I dared to try and draw a car. An exceptionally good one, for being me (if I may say so), but still a bit off. Don´t know what it is about cars, but I find them incredibly difficult to draw. I guess they are completely out of my "comfort zone" in drawing (interesting discussion going on right now about comfort zones in the EDM yahoo group).

The building is the big City Library, kind of famous even outside of Stockholm. I´ve heard it´s often visited by foreign architechts who read about it in some glossy minimalist architect magazine and felt they had to come and see for themselves. It is beautiful, and quite surprising when you are inside it.

Right opposite of the library, I spotted this window and went wow. I never noticed it before, it´s fit for a gothic church, but is an ordinary apartment window. Or well, perhaps not so ordinary, but still.

Funny, the things you notice around you once you stop to take a look.