My Art Workshop

These paintings are not new. I made them back in the early 90’ies and they are some of my very first paintings in watercolor ever. I remember it was early spring, and I had brought two crocuses inside and arranged them in a tiny glass of water. Painting them was difficult, as I tried very hard to keep those thin delicate lines on each leave white. That’s a difficult task. But considering those two paintings were my very first, I think I did a good job.

For decades the two paintings have lived a life on my kitchen walls. I know my mom loves them, so I decided to use the paintings to create a birthday card for her a week back. The original paintings have somewhat faded by now, but scanning them I was able to color correct them, to restore them to their former glory. It was nice seeing them again, as they looked when they were new.

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.

I am renovating my blog. It has looked like this since the beginning in 2014. During that time span much has happened, that changes in here are needed. But for now I have a few photos I shot today, as I got a new toy for my camera. Three separation rings that allows me to do insanely close up macro shots. And it’s so much fun! Tiny little details, that I never noticed before, suddenly turned into works of art. It’s almost magic. 🙂

This is a tiny thing meant as an ATC (Artist Trading Card). It’s only 8,9×6,4 cm so its a real challenge getting anything detailed enough to call it an artistic creation in that small a space. I had a plan of entering an artist trading initiative for February with the theme “dynamic duos”.

I was supposed to make three cards so I settled on my own little sub theme: “Royals and their weird pets” and thought the ancient Egyptian princess Isiemkheb and her pet gazelle would be a good start.

I had a plan of creating one of Queen Victoria and a pet donkey too – who knows perhaps I will some day – but when I had finished the first card I did not think the card fitted a “dynamic duo” that well after all.

But then something wonderful happened. When I put the card on my Tumblr account one of my friends there loved it and we ended up swapping cards. So Isiemkheb and her gazelle was shipped to USA to live happily ever after, and I recieved the most amazing tiny work of art from my friend, that I now have at my workspace to enjoy daily <3

I saw this tiny little interesting house on our way to Italy for summer holiday two years back. I went for a drive by shooting and was lucky to actually catch it through the car window. I did add a bit of extra details in my drawing, mostly a bit of flowers and foliage, but most of the house truly was a tiny fairy-tale.

A few weeks back I went to a Danish clay museum with my good friend. This is a quick sketch of one of the typical famous royal Danish mussel painted porcelain pieces we saw there.

Time to study anatomy. Today I chose feet. I found a challenge to draw 50 feet. I am not quite there yet but four feet is on the right track.

A lady sitting opposite me at the Croquis Class. She did not move much, so I had plenty of time to draw her.

I had left my coal at home, so I was experimenting with color pencils and crayons for this session.

Today was a wonderful sunny day. Since it is February, nice weather is usually a rare thing and next week we shall be looking at Siberian winter. I went to photograph these drawings outside in the bright sunshine. Because I had had time to study this model’s face a bit closer I really like a few of my portraits of her. So I polished the drawings a bit and here they are.

Now I find it fairly easy to draw organic living forms. There are of course still proportions to learn and all, but if a line is a bit off, I can always compensate on the pose or the shading. I want to practice another aspect of art: Buildings, cars and other technical drawings where hard precise lines HAVE to be correct. So a while ago, when I was walking in the city I took photos of buildings intended for later sketches. Yesterday I found those photos and ended up with a drawing of Voldbrohus in Randers. I used the last paint left overs from the guinea fowl to give the drawing a bit of color too using the gouache more as a water color really.

I think I did pretty good – I like the result 🙂 Now what to draw today? It has to be fairly quick and fun, since its evening by now. It’s Friday so I might end up following Oabnormal’s draw along stream.

I have for a while wanted to dip my feet into painting – real painting. I know watercolors fairly well by now, but I had watched a few people working with gouache in Youtube and it looked really interesting. So this is my first attempt doing gouache: A helmeted guineafowl that I saw during our trip to South Africa almost a year ago now.

I learned that gouache is insanely hard to control! It is supposed to be possible to paint in layers, so that you can paint light over dark. Well…it is possible, but watch out! Water reactivates the layers underneath. If you do more than a couple of brush strokes, you will end up with a muddy grey cake paint. I fought this piece every step on the way. The super cheap paper in my sketchbook definitely buckled up noticeably, so next time I need better paper. In spite of that I very much like the result 🙂