Patient owls, and some sketches waiting for colour

This week's a bit of a mad week, and there hasn't been much space for painting, or rather, none at all. And I'm so behind with colouring in my lunch- and trainsketches. And I've neglected them a bit too, to be honest. But that was mainly because I spent my train journeys and lunch breaks with reading Harold Speed's The Practice and Science of Drawing. Written in 1917, but still a fascinating read, and a most inspiring one too. 

But anyway. I did a couple of lunchsketches in the past few days, and I found a finished sketch which I haven't blogged about yet. So these will have to do for today's Paint Party Friday. I was thinking about giving the party a miss altogether today, but to be honest, I could do with the "company". So here I am, with my row of colourful owls patiently waiting for news,...

 ... and a few sketches patiently waiting for colour.

I hope to have some time, and inspiration, to colour these sketches, and to do some painting too, over the weekend. But we'll see. I'll definitely try to visit as many blogs as possible, but my mind's a bit preoccupied at the moment, so I apologise in advance if I'm not going to do a very good job with keeping up. But I'll do my best.

Happy Paint Party Friday!

Grocery shopping, the artist's way

Yesterday after work, I found myself in the supermarket trying to do the shopping for next week's lunches. I was totally uninspired, circling around and around the section, trying to decide what I would want to cook. The only condition was that it had to be food that I could keep till Sunday. At one point I found myself staring at the huge variety of tomatoes. It's amazing how the choice has increased over the past few years, when there were only about two, or three at most, varieties of tomatoes available. I was especially fascinated by a big huge tomato that looked a bit like one of those pumpkins. They were ridiculously expensive, but I thought it would just be perfect to sketch and paint, and so I decided to get just the one.

The addition of the tomato still didn't solve my problem of what vegetable to get to go with the potatoes and fennels I already got. I decided to go for the good old carrot. While steering towards the big box of carrots, I remembered having seen some of those yellow ones not too long ago. Now wouldn't yellow carrots be nice to sketch too, and make a much better page in my sketchbook together with my special tomato? Yes, they had yellow carrots, and I happily made my way to the tills, having not only sorted out my lunches, but my an evening of sketchign too.

It was one of the rare sunny days yesterday, so I took the chance to take some photos of my veggies on the window sill, before sketching them. It's been quite a while since I've done some proper photography other than landscape shots while out walking, and I really enjoyed snapping my tomato and carrots from all sides (hence the slight photo overload in this post).

Then on to sketching them. I decided to use my new square watercolour sketchbook I had found recently in an art shop here (and let me tell you, sketchbooks with real watercolour paper are hard to find here). It's 25x25cm, which is a good size to work with at home, and it's square, which I always like. I made the sketches using a pencil first, then going over with a pen.

Adding colour. I really enjoyed getting out my proper, expensive watercolour paints again. I even went so far as to leave out white spaces for the highlights on the tomato, instead of going over with white gouache or a gel pen to add them later, as I usually do.

I meant to have the tomato for dinner, but it was getting a bit late, and I didn't want to use a photo as reference but the real thing for adding the colour, to get all the highlights and shadows more or less right. Photos are very useful to use for painting, but it's always nicer to have the real thing, so I ended up not having it. The sacrifices we make for the sake of art...

I haven't quite decided yet if it's finished or not, but I think I'll probably leave it as it is. And I'll have to find some more interesting vegetables or fruits to sketch. And I'm looking forward to a lovely tomato dinner when I get home tonight.

Linking this up to the delicious Paint Party Friday

Piglets' big day out

Spring, or rather summer, has come and gone, and the temperatures have dropped from the up to 25 degrees of the last days to a cool maximum of 8 degrees. And it's raining cats and dogs now, and it's not going to stop soon. Ah well, I'm certainly not happy about the grey and wet, but to honest, I wasn't too pleased about the hot and humid sunshine of the past few days either. I know, some people are hard to please.

But although it might be cold, and wet, and grey here, the piglets are enjoying their day out, and they are all so excited to go to the big party that is taking place every Friday - it is, of course, the fabulous Paint Party Friday they're heading off to. They have scrubbed themselves until they were all squeaky clean and shiny pink to make the best possible impression at the party.

 And the big spotted piglet has put on its brightest and cleanest necktie, and is hurrying across the grass as fast as his stubby little feet can go to catch up with the others. He's so excited to be part of the party, he doesn't want to miss a single minute of the fun.

Where's the time gone?

Can't believe we're already one third into April! Life's somehow quite busy, one way or another, and there's not so much time for painting or blogging. And the mad April weather is just sucking out all my energy. But it seems spring will at least make an appearance over the weekend. I have kept up my little train- and lunchsketches though, and today I'm just sharing my little owls, even though I haven't finished painting them yet. They were such fun to sketch, and they just make me smile. I've filled a few more pages in my sketchbook, and I hope to share more for Friday's Paint Party, and during my upcoming looooong, relaxing weekend. But we'll see. No pressure :)

Where is home?

I have been thinking a lot about where I want to live these past few years, where my real home is. While Switzerland is a pretty good to place to live in, and Zürich regularly makes it into the top ranks of the world's best cities to live in, I always felt it was not the place where I really belonged. In fact, I always liked my city, my country best from outside, from a certain distance, for a short visit. I've lived abroad for a year twice, and dreamed of working and living abroad for ages, and I've been thinking about it more often again recently. I think the big canvas (it's 60x120 cm) I'm working on at the moment reflects this search for that place I'm still looking for. I very rarely start a painting without having any idea at all about what I'm going to paint, but this is one of them. All I knew was that I wanted it to be green to match the bedroom. This is what was beginning to emerge in the first session.

In the second session, I still didn't have a clue about where I wanted to go with this, only that I wanted to tone down the bright colours a little bit.

It is not finished yet, and while I do have one or two ideas what I might try - or not, I'm still not sure at all what it will look like when it's finished. We'll see.

Have you found your true home? Do you live in the place where you belong? How did you find it and get there?

Linking up to the wonderfully inspiring Paint Party Friday, which is always a beautiful place to visit.

Simplicity, the continuing journey, and an art journal page

The last two, three years have been a journey of change in many ways for me. But I feel that I still haven't arrived. I'm still trying to figure out the life I want to live, and how to get there. Blogging, the internet, has played a big part of this development so far. I found inspiring online workshops and met like-minded artists around the globe, all having an impact on my own work. And my way of painting has changed a lot through these experiences. New techniques, new paints, new ideas. Painting, art, have become a much bigger part of my life than it ever had in the whole of my 15+ years of painting, and there are things I'm now beginning to feel are possible, which I'd never even dared to dream of three years ago. It is all part of something I don't yet have the right words for yet. Part of the journey. 

I'm reading a book at the moment, which I came across on a blog, the way you find these things in blogland, by one click leading to another and another... The book's called "Less is More", ed. by Cecile Andrews and Wanda Urbanska. It's a collection of essays on the concept of Volontary Simplicity. As someone who never seems to be able to get rid of the chaos, I'm naturally drawn to the idea of simplicity. But most books just seem to be practical instructions on how to declutter your home and get rid of half of your wardrobe. Which is not a bad thing as such. But what I like about this book is that it's about the bigger picture of living a simpler life, which includes such issues as sustainability, commuty etc. It's not just about having a home with less stuff in it, but about a fundamental change of our society, about the way we live, what we value, and what ultimately makes us happy. I find it very inspiring, and it makes me think a lot about my own life, and how I want to live it. It's yet another step on the way. 

It also inspired me to create a page in my art journal. First a layer or two with some vibrant colours.

Then trying out the new liquid acrylics I bought during my long weekend in England two weeks ago. Absolutely love this metallic pink!

The last step was adding the word with the help of a new stencil alphabet. I first wanted to do the letters in colour, but at the end decided that the outlines would work best here. Keeping it simple.

Linking up to the wonderful Paint Party Friday, which is such an inspiring place.

And a big Thank You to all of you out there in blogland, who have been, and continue to be, such a great inspiration, and who help me to keep continuing on my journey in so many different ways.

Putting the paints to the test & Gel pen love

With my Sunday being taken over by formats, file copying, and too many computers on my desk, I decided to try and do a little Sunday sketch at least. To be honest, my new cheap paints, and the newly begun second sketchbook were just too irresistible, and so much more attractive than just watching files being copied. And so I ended up painting my new paints.

Which on top of it being quite a good exercise in perspective (I challenged myself not to do the simple view straight from above this time) also serves as a reference for how the colours look on paper.

I first put some water down in the black area of the box to get an even layer of paint, but I didn't use that much, so I wasn't that surprised when no paint bled through (and I checked about every 5 seconds!). But rather pleased, nevertheless. But I wanted to put them to a test. A real test. I soaked the page with lots of water, and then added several layers of black, to get a really dark background. And guess what: no bleeding through, at all!

I was also very pleased about how beautifully opaque the black became after three or four layers. A perfect background for what I had in mind. Which was trying out my new funky gel pens. I already couldn't live with my white gel pen(s), and I only discovered more colours at the local stationer's the day before.

I spent both my train journeys on Monday, morning and evening, with adding all the flowery details, first white, then with a range of metallic pink, red, purple and green. It was a bit of a challenge for me, as I like the safety of the pencil to start a sketch with. But I really like the result. And I've alreay got a new background prepared. I wonder how many colours they have in their gel pen range?

Unfortunately, I'll have to give tomorrow's Paint Party Friday a miss, as when this (scheduled) post appears on my blog, I'm already in England, for a long relaxing weekend of beach walks, picturesque villages, and cream teas. I just hope that the weatherpeople got it wrong, and it's not going to rain the entire 5 days, as they forecast.

Have a terrific weekend!

Cheap paint and FAT32

Last week, I finished my little sketchbook with TrainSketches. Of course, I've already started working in a new one straight away. I hope that they are going to develop into a nice little series of sketchbooks, filled with inspiration I can go back to when looking for some ideas for a painting.

I used my good artists quality watercolour paints for colouring my sketches, but while the paper definitely takes the paint a whole lot well better than a Moleskine sketchbook, I had some problems with the paint bleeding through and ruining the sketches on the other pages all over the place. I also thought that my good, expensive paints were just a little bit too good and expensive to use for these little sketches. Cheaper paints would do more than enough here. So I went shopping on Friday, and bought a little box of cheap paints. The whole box cost me less than one single pan of my good watercolours.

The disadvantage of course is that the colour range is somewhat limited. Only 12 colours, as opposed to the the luxury of my total of 55 gorgeous artists watercolours, which include such favourites of mine as Prussian Green, Indigo and Cobalt Turquoise. The colours in my cheap little new set don't even seem to have names at all.

But so far, they seem to be doing what they are supposed to do - adding (much more) vibrant colour to my little sketches without ruining any of the others - rather well. So far, anyway. I've only done one sketch so far, so we'll have to wait and see about the bleeding through issue when I do the next.

And as to the problem of the limited colour range, I bought an individual pan of a differnt brand to try out, a lovely dark turquoise. It seems to be pretty much the same as the paints in the set, and even mixes perfectly well with the them, so I've ordered an additional box, with 24 colours. They're a little bit more expensive, but still a whole lot cheaper than my good ones.

I was planning to spend a great part of Sunday with some 'proper' painting, after what seems an eternity. I soon realised, however, that that was not going to happen. The thing is, I bought a new computer about three or four weeks ago. Now I guess most of you know what a boring, time consuming business it is to copy files from an old computer to a new one. And if you also happen to be a keen photographer on top of everything else, and easily take 300+ photos on a day out, and keep them as both RAW and JPEG files, the former easily reaching file sizes of 20MB and more, just in case you'll ever want to do some more serious editing than with the lower quality JPEG, once you've got Lightroom installed, like in a million years or so. But you never know. Better save(d) than sorry. But it makes for a lot of file copying, and it takes ages.

And if you then switch from an old, slow paintcovered Windows laptop to a shiny, new iMac, things really get complicated. Because on top of all the copying from one machine to the other, there's also the format issue. At least I now got that second backup hard drive I've been wanting to buy for quite some time. So now I've got a 3TB drive, formatted for my new Mac, and my old 2TB drive, formatted for my laptop, which means that, although I can actually access my photos from my Mac, I can't move them or add to them with it. Luckily, I also have a handy little portable 500GB drive, which works like a simple memory stick for all formats. Perfect for copying stuff from one computer to the other. So I thought. Until I discovered that it seemed to be broken, and refused to have anything moved or deleted from it. I tried using my little 32GB stick, but soon realised that that was not going to work at all. Not if I wanted to get my stuff on to my new computer in anything like under 5 years. So I did some googling, and actually managed to reformat my little 500GB drive in a FAT32 format, which, as I learned, means that it works with both Mac and Windows. And it's now working perfectly again, a fact of which I'm rather proud of, to be honest.

So file copying is now my first priority, and I ended up spending the whole of Sunday with two computers on my desk, trying to copy the files in a somewhat more organised and efficient way than what I've been doing in the past 3 weeks (which is a complete mess). And then I'll just have to reformat the old 2TB drive as FAT32, and I'll have two back ups at last. And then I'll be finally back at my easel.

And in the meantime, I'll just continue with my sketches :)