My Art Workshop

Last Friday the challenge for #365daystoaportfolio was to draw and/or paint fish. So I decided to try catch up and do a koi today. I had it drawn fairly early in the day but I wanted it colored too.

I went to Twitch to see if I could find inspiration. There I found Nina Huang who was working on painting an amazing Japanese inspired pattern, using a cunning technique to have the pattern turn out as a repeat pattern. She uses her own art work to send to China to get it printed on fabric and then she sews clothing from it! I found that absolutely amazing. Her webpage is very inspiring, I love her thoughts on the creative process. I was so inspired by her, that I could share my drawing with Nina same evening.

Last Wednesday the challenge to draw was cats. It’s the same process as yesterday – crappy paper, black pen, no regrets and watercolor dapped on in splotches to create…something. The more I draw and paint like this, the more it feels like coming home. It’s strange, but it feels good 🙂

Studying dogs, using a pen and watercolor. It’s a challenge working with the pen instead of pencil. I can’t regret and change a line. I am trying to get a better grasp on using watercolor being more loose than I ever tried before. It gets parts of the drawings really wonky, but funny enough I like the results a lot. So in general Yay for my decision to use my small, ugly super cheap sketchbook where I don’t take my drawings so terribly serious. It’s not at all made for watercolor and the paper bends like crazy when it gets wet – still, it now holds those drawings and I really love them. It was great fun just letting loose, and the result to me looks alive and casually elegant 🙂

Did this yesterday using a felt pen and quick watercolors. They are all insects from my garden.

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Today was beautiful spring day. I ended up gardening in the sunshine. Later I did an exercise in drawing garden tools. It’s nothing really serious but I had fun with it anyway 🙂

One of the amazing animals we saw in South Africa was the genet. We nearly drove past it during the pitch black darkness on our way back to camp, when Rasmus spotted the reflective eyes of this beauty in a tree.

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In our safari in South Africa one of our drivers asked me for a drawing. This guy was my obvious choice. So I found my small water color travel set and took up the challenge. We had met The Lion King several times in our safaris. We have heard him roar at night just outside camp and we have heard him purr gently in the tall grass just next to our car. I left this original painting with Jodie and only brought home the photo of the drawing. Here he is for you to see and for me to remember.

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Continuing the South Africa animal theme. I found this photo of the amazing secretary bird in a random google search and I just knew I had to paint it. I tested a watercolor technique where sprinkling salt over the wet paint will create a nice interesting effect. I like how that turned out. As it turned out we were super lucky to spot one of these in South Africa when we went on Safari there later this year.
In the car going back home from Funen I was trying to use my Ipad as a drawing tool. Let’s just say that is a challenging tool! My first drawing disappeared with no trace before I got to save it. And the next one…, well after many curses and attempts to edit and correct and redraw and work around Ipad bugs and road bumps until the thing went out of power, I ended up with this for the Sketchdaily theme “Candles”. Not my best work ever, but I got to play with a tool I am very far from comfortable with and it was fun in the end. It was an experiment in a completely new media 🙂

When I was around 5-6 years old I had my first nightmare that I still remember. It came during a huge hurricane that blew over a lot of trees in the nearby forest.

Our house was old and poorly isolated and my family all went to bed early that night. It was hard falling asleep. The rain was pounding at the windows of my dark room and the wind was blowing around the house corners, so strongly that it was roaring like a wild animal.

On the roof of our house right above my room stood our old and worn tv antenna, which when the wind grabbed it, at some point started to howl very much like a wolf. In between the very strong winds the damn thing rattled, giving a weird metallic foreign growling sound.

In my vivid imagination all those powerful sounds grew into a mighty beast: “Mørke-ulven”. Translated directly it means something along the lines of “The wolf of darkness”. It was haunting me all night long and its terrible howl I can still hear in my mind to this day.

I still remember the sheer horror of facing this creature. I knew it was coming for me and it meant my doom!

I have tried to draw “Mørkeulven” a few times by now. I never manage to truly capture the horror – Yet. But some day I will 🙂 Today I tried with watercolor and afterwards quite a bit of digital drawing. It was a fun painting to make and I like the result even though this is nowhere near as dramatic and scary as “Mørkeulven”.

A while back my aunt paid a visit. She paints watercolors too and suggested we could share the passion and paint something when we had a few hours of free time.

I chose to paint one of my neighbors Jersey cows. I still had a few unused photos of them from my earlier adventure to the Jersey cow fields nearby. This one was extremely cute as she stood there peacefully chewing on a dandelion flower. I just had to paint her.

I very much like some of the old Danish poster artist’s work. I think this painting has some of the same charm, and I especially like how the background turned out and how the dandelion and the cow’s tail and ear breaks free of the frame.

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