My Art Workshop

Completing a fun challenge of 2019, creating something Bauhaus inspired digitally. I love the loose playfulness of this, finding strange creatures in random lines.

Yesterday it was time for the annual checkup for my little Kia Picanto. It needed summer tires changed to winter tires too, so I drove off knowing it might take a while getting all that fixed at the mechanics. I am happy I brought all my drawing equipment, especially the ink that I am really starting to fall in love with. With an audio book and a cosy corner with a chair and a small table at the mechanics I spend hours waiting, never being bored as I worked on these two cat drawings.

We have had a shy visitor for more than a week now. He rushes in, grabs the acorns he wants and is off again. He is clearly super intelligent and keeps his distance. Yesterday however I think he decided we knew each other well enough to get introduced. He stayed and posed nicely long enough for me to get a few shots. He really is one of our most spectacular birds in Denmark. Look at that moustache!

Eurasian jay
Another little visitor is living life dangerously on our porch, sharing it with our two very welcoming cats. So far the little critter is still alive. He is wise enough to quickly shoot out of the way when anything moves nearby. But today I was quicker and got a nice shot of him.

Yesterday I watched a few artists
presenting their work in YouTube videos and I felt so inspired by artists
like Mary
Doodles, M.D.
Campbell and James
Burke.
They are incredibly creative and have their own style, which is not necessarily
super realistic.

I decided to use random themes for my
ink drawings, so I grabbed my old Danish vocabulary book and closed my eyes to
chose a completely random word as reference for my challenge. It was great fun.
I ended up with “Stolen”.

I found opportunity to combine practicing plein air and practicing sketching buildings two times last week. Once in the heart of my city and once in my Mom’s backyard.

Mom travels. On her walls hangs souvenirs from faraway countries and exciting adventures. This guy here is…I think…from Bali. He is a mask made out of a coconut. I borrowed him for a sketching and watercolor practice session.

The detective and the rat – now in color 🙂

A quick mostly digital sketch experimenting with two figures close together.
Update on the flower color experiment I will have to say the colors are not exactly light resistant. When experimenting with this kind of paint it’s important to get the image scanned right away, since the original won’t have a long life. Even as I was painting it the colors changed as they dried up. Greens turned yellowish so fast. No direct light has touched the painting, it has been hiding in my sketchbook, and still this is how it looks now.

I never tried this before. This image looks like watercolors but it’s actually colors from flowers and berries I collected in my garden yesterday and left to steep in water overnight.

Some of the colors came from carrots (the sun), redcurrant gave the very vibrant pink, which turned out to be so dominant, I could paint it on top of any other color, and it would take over. I also used lavenders that gave a rich brown and granny’s bonnet gave me a soft bright grassy green. It soon faded to more of a yellow though.

It was a challenge to find a blue color or at least blueish.
The revelation came when I mixed blackcurrant and dogwood on the paper, and to my huge surprise watched how the olive green dogwood and the deep purple blackcurrant shifted into the most amazing minty blue-green.
Experimenting a bit more I was able to get a range of blue and green colors with that mix.

Most colors were very soft and weak, since they were very diluted. A few of them I boiled to try strengthen them, but it came with a price of the color turning brownish. It worked fine with lavenders, less fine with the soft pink I got from rose petals.

I never thought I would be able to find a range of colors in my garden at this point with the drought and all, to actually be able to paint a decent rain-forest, which was today’s theme on SketchDaily.

But it turned out that dried out and very sad blackcurrant berries works just as fine as ripe and delicious ones for this purpose. I had cut down the very dried out lavender flowers, and tossed them in a garbage pile, still the petals worked fine extracting color from. And the rose petals were from roses way past their pretty bloom.

This picture took layers and layers to finish. In the end I added a bit of black and white ink to add details to it all.