Illustration assignment

I am currently taking an online course in illustration, which is very exciting. It is based on assignments that are turned in first to the othter students for commenting and then to the teacher for comments and grades after changes have been made. The first assignment was to illustrate the month of April for a fictive calender printed by the city Malmö, Sweden. As I have been there only once, I had to rely on Google to provide me some inspiration. After trying some different subjects and styles I settled for the above watercolor/ink motive of the bridge between Sweden and Denmark along with some spring flowers and birds. In the background, hardly visible, is the wind farm Lillgrund. I wanted it to be a bigger part of the composition first, but I could not really fit it in. Below are some other ideas I was working on, in a very different style.

This is a famous building in Malmö (Turning Torso) along with some typical spring attributes. It was a quick sketch on paper, which I added some color to and then added the background in Photoshop. I don´t think it turned out so good though - I would have wanted to do something funny with the backhround working with textures, but I am still struggeling to learn the basics of PS. I realised it would have been easier to work with if I hadn´t added the color so I did an experiment....

 

...with the above linedrawing which I scanned and colored in Photoshop. I think one could do something more interesting to background and colors here as well with a bit more PS-skill... For comparison, below is the same drawing, but hand colored. It´s the same one in two versions, to demonstrate another problem that I constantly have: the first one is a photo, which makes it too grey and ugly. The second one is scanned, which makes all the light colors dissapear. Any tips as how to solve either of these problems would make me insanely happy....

 

Hängmatta

One of my favourite lunch places in Stockholm - Café Hängmatta! They have the greatest vegan sallads and soups. It takes forever to get the food, but on the other hand you have a lot of interesting non-matching furniture do draw while waiting...

Chambres en Ville

Just a quick sketch from the room at the little gorgeous B&B I stayed at when I last visited Brussels for a meeting. I really don´t enjoy doing interious, but something about this view just caught my attention. I think it was the glimps of the old fashioned bath tub that was really inviting... I didn´t have any time to try it out though. Next time?

Dr Sketchys Anti Art School

I have been to two life drawing sessions at Dr Sketchy´s Anti Art School at Tureteatern in Stockholm. This has really been a lot of fun, and very difficult too. There are different themes each time, the first I went to was "Manga and Anime" and the second one "History of Music". There are models dressing up as someone and posing in 5-6 minute poses. The poses are usually quite challenging (for the models at least!) with funny facial expressions (which I am never able to catch, unfortunately).  I have had real problems with my scanner lately and I have tried to scan and post but given up after half of the colors disappeared in the scanner - especially the light areas just go blank. Any ideas of what I am doing wrong? Maybe I should go back to just taking photos with my Iphone or I will never get anything out here.... Anyway, here are some of the sketches that ended up ok from the scanner.... I just dropped the rest for now!

 From "History of Music"

 From Manga and Anime

Stockholm sketchgroup, late as usual

This is one of the sketches I produced the last time the Stockholm sketchgroup (Skissa i Stockholm) met. It was end of August, but since then, a lot of things came inbetween of posting...

The most beautiful orchid ever...

...at least in my livingroom... It was as pretty when we went away for vacations as it was when we came back. This really makes me want to paint a real watercolor, but I know I always get in to trouble when it comes to backgrounds - and foregrounds. Especially tables. I just don´t know how to handle large, boring areas of brown!? Any ideas?

Where did Summer go?

I am, as usual, really, really, really behind with the posting. As you may see below, nothing has happened here since May! I think I will have to develop some kind of routine - scan and post every Tuesday morning, perhaps? Anyway, since it has been so long, I thought I would try for a kind of "summer catch-up" and publish a few selected spreads from my summer vacation, mostly spent in the Archipelargo south of Stockholm (Sörmlandskusten). It just might be the most beautiful place on earth and it is really hard to do it justice, but here goes... This time, the scanner did not cooperate at all, and the spreads with a lot of white just did not work at all, some of these below also look weird, but I decided on "good enough"- otherwise it will just never happend!

View from Lökholmarna, outside Nyköping, where we were completely alone in the bay.

 Some cliffs. I just love the look of these rocks in the archipelargo, with all different patterns and colors...

 

Ågården - a small restaurant/bed and breakfast in the beautiful little coast town Trosa. We had the most delicious meal of the whole summer here, and my mother came to visit and stayed in one of the tiny, extremely cute bedrooms.

 

Hävringe båk. This is a small island outside of Nyköping/Oxelösund which nowadays harbours a lighthouse, as well as this famous - well, I have no idea what it is called in english.... It is a building painted in white and red, which can be seen from far out at sea and which was used by sailors to orient themselfs as they approached the coast. Suggestions? (Note to self: buy english maritime dictornary....)

 

We sailed out in the hope of being able to go ashore and stay for the day, but the tiny harbour was very full (they only have like tree-four berths for guest boats). We ended up circling around it two times for photos and some quick sketches instead...

 

View from Lilla Trässö, outside of Oxelösund. A more or less perfect day.... great weather, warm water for swims, (well, around 20 degrees Celcius, just as warm as it gets here...), and a nice view!

 

Well, that was my summer.... Or parts of it anyway. Hope you all had a good one too...

EdiM catch-up 8-12

No 8 - draw a coffee pot. I don´t own a coffee pot - I brew my coffee straight into the thermo jug... As I got out the coffee-thermo-jug and the cups to draw, the kids thought it was coffee time and enthusiastically went for the cookie jar so I had to do some cookies as well...

I was away over the weekend, so I missed out on a few EdiMs and I had to do a really quick catch up of no:s 9-12: A lock, something creepy (the spider, although I am not really afraid of spiders), gloves and the oldest thing in my refrigerator. Judging by the other posts in the group, I am not the only one hiding a really old bottle of tabasco in a dark corner of my fridge...

Adventures in March....

I am running a bit behind with the posting, but here comes a little catch-up from March - just to get to the more recent sketches soon :) The above is a sketch from the Sthlm Boat Expo "Allt för sjön". It is hard to sketch environments with that massive amount of detail - I try to simplify but it just gets messy somehow...

The last sketch is a quick tulip sketch made while waiting for the family outside the kid´s sunday school. I negotiated with my husband to let me spend the time sketching and he had to take care of the baby! Then I strolled around trying to find some amazing view, but everything was just boring and it was too cold so I decided to just sit inside and sketch the first corner I could find with an empty chair!

Both sketches in pencil and watercolor on Saunders Waterford satin in my sketchbook.

Winter in Stockholm

Now spring is finally approaching! This has been a long winter with a lot of snow and cold. Some days that just means a lot of trouble getting the kids dressed up for kindergarden and school, but some days that means beautiful winter landscapes to walk in and to sketch! Goodbye winter for now though (I hope)!

Amaryllis

This is a flower usually seen around Christmas in Sweden - I don´t know if it is also a traditional christmas flower in other countries? I love them anyway and I have been longing to paint some. I didn´t have time for more than a sketchbook page this year however.... But maybe next year? It is not so far away... And a new sketchbook awaits since this was the last page of my old one! New times ahead! For next year I wish for more drawing time.....

Happy New Year to you all!

Life drawing.... model!

I have been terrible at updating lately... There has not been much drawing time since the kids have been constantly sick. And then I am just too tired also. Right now I am mostly spending my time waiting for the baby to come out.... I have done some café drawings but I haven´t managed to take pictures and post.

I did do something I have never done before the other week though - being a life drawing model! It was kind of weird, but it was just a group of friends so it went alright - I wasn´t too nervous :) I don´t really feel that my body is my own right now anyway. One of my friends took some pictures so I could join a bit in drawing myself also - first I did a sketchbook page, but chose the wrong paper, the one that doesn´t work with watercolor so it just got messy (bottom one). Then we did some watercolors from our drawings with the group (top one). I just took some photos with my phone, so the image quality is really crappy. Sorry about that!

February coffebreak

Last week, I had coffe at a really nice little Café in Nyköping, where my mother lives, sitting out in their backyard in the middle of the winter.... They have a kind of a green-house, heated and with tables for guests, where you can sit all year around. Nice! I enjoyed a "Semla" a Swedish traditional bakery that we eat in February, actually, it is not supposed to be consumed before the official day of the "semla", which is the day before Lent, so I cheated a bit... I somehow seem to do that every year!? 

My pictures get horrible, by the way. I really need to get a scanner, but I don´t know which one or how to use it. Ideas, anyone?

International sketchcrawl #34

New year, new sketchbook, new mission.... There has been limited time for sketching lately and thus the blog has been rater inactive. I decided to take it up again, and a friend and I challenged each other to do some kind of artistic activity every day - even if it is only a five minute pencil drawing. Just to get into the flow again... This weekend we went to meet with other sketchers at the 34th international sketchcrawl gathering in Stockholm. We were six people meeting at Citykonditoriet, which is an old café in the center of Stockolm, with a lot of interesting interiors and details. We had planned to move on to some museum, but we had such a nice, relaxed time that we just kind of got stuck there!

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I also did an after-sketchcrawl drawing of my husband reading later that afternoon. It doesn´t really look like him though. I would have needed a pen with an extra-fine nib for the details in the face - now they just look a bit messy. He thinks I was generous with the hair though - maybe wishful thinking? 

Some new EDM:s

I haven´t been able to log in at blogger for almost a whole week. Strange! But I have published my every day in May´s on Flicker at least... Here are my two latest catch-ups. It is unbelievable how hard it is for me to squeeze in drawing-time every day! I had really planned not to do too complicated stuff and to give my self 10 minutes each day for this. But time just seems to slip through my fingers somehow. This weekend I was alone with the kids and had to do a birthday cake, so now I am behind again...

Every Day in May - catch up!

On top of everything else I am engaged in at the moment, I also said I will do the Every Day in May challenge this year. One sketch a day.... I started out badly by missing the first five, so I had to do a panic-catchup. But now I am on track again....until tomorrow! From the top the sketches show EDMs No: 

#101, draw a bar of soap 

#102, draw a power plug

#103 draw some exercise equipment (the blue things in the bottom sketch - if you wonder, it is some things you kick at when training martial arts, don´t know what they are called in English... It was the first thing that fell out of the fitness-bag when i searched, but I must confess that it was a couple of years since I used them!)

#104 draw some salt and pepper shakers (only had room left for one, though....)

#105 draw some scissors

#106 draw something tart or sour. Well, I don´t know what tart means, so I went for sour... the lemon in the middle sketch.

All of the above done in my Moleskin Watercolour Notebook with watercolour and ink.

EDM 291 - book illustration

EDM 291 - draw an illustration for the cover of your favourite book.

The Shire

Well, this has taken me a while.... Simultaneously as this challenge came out I got as homework for my illustrations course to make a series of illustrations for a book, so I thought I would kill two birds with one stone, and did my all time favourite - the Lord of the rings. This turned out to be harder than I could imagine since there was so much pressure from all those years of reading and imagining, watching the movie, admiring the drawings of Alan Lee... well, you get the idea.

Long time, no update

Watercolour and pencil in Moleskin Watercolour Notebook

Well, I have been rather busy lately.... a lot to do at work, and constantly ill. I have had all sorts of "normal" colds, a lot of fever and added mysterious loss of feeling in half of my body, which led to that I ended up in the hospital beeing x-rayed all over and having all sorts of tests taken. This is a drawing I made in my sketchbook while waiting for an x-ray examination. They never found anything though, which was a relief. Let´s just hope it was a normal winter-cold-attack or something...

In the spirit of.... #1

...Stina Wirsén. Sort of. Ink, collage and coloured pencils on paper.

This is an assignment for a corse that I take in illustration. The assignment is to do three illustrations in the spirit of another illustrator, inspired by some daily activity in your life. This is inspired by Swedish artist Stina Wirsén who make fantastic illustrations for childrens books, fashion magazines, newspapers..... The story in my first example above is me doing yoga to mentally run away from the stressful ordinary life in the city (right side) to some calm "inner place" or something, inspired by nature (left side). The text reads "andas" which means "breathe". I realize I should have turned it around since you usually read from left to right, but hey.... my life is a mess anyway ;)

EDM #290 Draw a teapot

Finally another EDM published! A teapot! This was a gift from my mother when I finished school so it has been with me for many years. It is made by a Swedish artist called Dagmar Änggård and I have always admired her pottery. She passed away some years ago though, so I have to take good care of my teapot...

As a small bonus I have drawn a traditional Swedish bakery called kanelbulle ("cinnamon bun", or similar. Translation help anyone?). I had to mention it since it happends to be the official day of the cinnamon bun - "kanelbullens dag" - in Sweden today. It makes me wonder... does everything have to have an official day now? Mother´s day and Father´s day I can buy, but honestly - "kanelbullens dag"???