My Art Workshop

I watched one of Holly Exley’s vlog posts on Youtube today. She is an illustrator I follow, who specializes in drawing vegan food. I bought one of her prints not long ago since I absolutely love how she paints plants in water colors. It’s now on my wall in my living room 🙂

I felt so inspired to draw by her video that I sat down to sketch a bit in my usual super cheap sketchbook, I did not really have an ambition of making a finished colored piece. I just wanted to do a bit of scribbling. But Holly’s work inspired me to bring out my water colors and play with a sketch of an old photograph of Hollyhocks I took last summer.

It’s looking nothing like what Holly makes, which I suppose is good, since then it’s my own style. But I did experiment with the green colors, using a lot more blues than I normally would have. I quite like the result.

The last two days I worked on the zebra foal. Saw him in the early morning light in a wild life resort in South Africa last year. He was super cute and the sun created a golden halo around his form.

My kid and I went to the mall and I brought my pen, paper and watercolors to sketch a few random people. It still is super fun to do and a really nice time to spend with my kid. I think my Inktober challenge pushed me to learn new stuff and to be more brave and comfortable with just attacking a drawing head on with no regrets. I really like my quick sketches from today.

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Yesterday’s bison rolling in the dust for refreshment. Encountered at Ditlevsdals Bison Farm at Funen, Denmark. The painting was given away as a present same day 🙂

Another holiday of painting. It feels good to be active being creative. Today has been calm and I found time to paint the view of the lake Bodensee in Germany. While on holidays I don’t really have any way of editing photos so here’s a few progress shots again:
My masking fluid came in handy today, to reserve the space for the boats. It gave me the freedom to play freely, splashing water and color everywhere to paint the sky and the lake waters without worrying about keeping the space for the boats clean. You see it as a pale green color on those two first shots.
Masking fluid however don’t remove easily on my cheap crappy paper which was never intended for watercolor. In fact I ended up removing masking fluid + the upper layer of paper.
With a bit of patching up errors and destroyed paper I ended up with a version I quite liked after all.

In all this I find it great fun to push the papers limits – sometimes what looks like errors can be turned into funny effects. Sometimes errors are just that: Completely irreversable blunders that destoys a painting 😀 For the longest time the sky in this painting looked like the last option of the two, but somehow, using a piece of paper towel lifting off color, in the end things worked out 🙂 I have been lucky two days in a row now ending up with something I like.

Arriving at Bodensee this afternoon. The campsite is beautiful and we are looking forward to exploring tomorrow 🙂 Today I spend a few hours just painting whatever was in front of me when I was lazying around outside the camper van. A huge thunderstorm finished the evening off with a spectacular lightshow over the lake.
A couple of progress shots
No image editing possible at the camp site, but here is the finished painting for today 🙂

Yesterday as I was minding my own business, this creature suddenly marched onto my desk, plopped down on its big fat ass in front of me and demanded to be put to paper.

I tried to ignore it for a good while. Creatures demanding to be placed into existence like that have no manners and should not just be let loose like that. After a while those puppy eyes he sent me softened my artist heart, so I noted down a few lines on a piece of paper. Nothing serious, nothing at all to be fussing about. But the creature jumped and clapped his hands excited. So I asked him what he liked and he went, “Bees!!”

I decided it was safe to add one. So a few more lines were added and the creature howled “Yes! yes! – and flowers!” and pulled my thumb. I grunted and added flowers randomly and then pushed the paper away, deciding that would be enough time wasted on him. And he did seem happy as he settled into existence with his flowers and his bee. So I went on with what I had been doing.

Only – it did not take long before I heard this rather loud insisting whisper: “This is great! But…it would be greater if the flowers were red, and the bumblebee is unhappy. He is not properly yellow and black striped. You can’t have a bumblebee that’s just plain white, it’s just not right!”

Of course I ignored him. Damn creature was not going to decide whether I should spend my entire day dealing with his colors. But he kept at it. Louder and louder he went whining about the colors. In the end I got tired of his complaints and found my watercolors and splashed some color on him. He loved it, but of course he demanded glitter and white gel pen too and a signature to make his head even bigger.

Rasmus says he whispered his name to him. So I present to you Darfoogb and his bumblebee, in color and all.

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For my birthday my kid gave me these new watercolors and a nice stack of watercolor paper too. The weather was amazingly beautiful this weekend. We were all in the garden enjoying it and celebrating, so I brought it out and started testing all the new materials. It ended up as an abstract painting that I quite like too, so here it is.

A new month and a new theme for the 365daystoaportfolio. I might miss the animal drawings so much that I might squeeze one in at times still. But today I did this pattern of autumn leaves as warm up. Today’s prompt is “Your outfit”. Hmmm…but I don’t look like my painting at all, so I guess my imagination took over a bit 🙂

South Africa! Our guide asked us what our favorite animal were a few days into the safari. We all had different answers and none of us said elephants or rhinos. We were being the weird crowd going “The dung beetles!” or “The kingfisher!” and I went “The Gnu!” And I still like the odd Gnu or … I think it’s wildebeest in English? It’s amazing! The gnus were all over the place wherever we went. So incredibly odd in shape, but also so clearly beautifully fitting perfectly with the environment. But coming home I must say he was right, the guide. It’s the rhinos that left me wanting more and going dreamy eyed thinking back. Such huge gentle creatures! Odd in shape too but somehow they managed to appear cute, even elegant at the same time, and each of them clearly had their own personality. The last animals we saw on the safari were a rhino and her calf as they grazed peacefully right next to our car just after sunset, so close that we could hear the peaceful “munch munch” sounds of their chewing. The rhino is definitely my favorite animal.

The kind of rhino I drew is extinct, as they all quite likely soon will be. The woolly rhino belonged in the ice age and the cold period right after. We only have evidence of them in the cave paintings and in the Siberian permafrost. So naturally it was a bit hard finding a reference photo for this drawing. So this is one of my photos of the white rhinos from our safari disguised as a woolly rhino, added a few details from my imagination.

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