Open doors

Too wet and windy today to continue my festival sketchbook in town. Instead I brought out the new watercolour sketchbook and drew (painted?!) doors.




I wanted a view through successive doorways, so this is looking from my livingroom, via the hall, towards the kitchen.



Blurry shot courtesy of a grey day.



I made the doorways more squat (they're very narrow) to give myself more space to play around. Not sure whether I should just have left the front plane white and only used colour on the part framed within the opening of the door.

Pencil sketch with watercolour and a touch of watercolour pencil in A4 size moleskine sketchbook.

Aarhus sketchcrawl

I had an Aarhus sketchcrawl today - as it turned out, all on my lonesome. I've been trying for a long time now to make up a group, but there is only ever me and my sketching buddy Anette. This time around I even tried hanging up flyers around town - outside art schools and in art material stores - but no luck.

I started out at 13:00 by the fountain Agnethe og Havmanden, waiting to see whether anyone would show up.


No luck, so I moved up to the little park behind Town Hall where a band was playing live.


Lots of little tents with bands playing dotted about the park on both sides of the road. I had a bit of trouble with rain spatters interrupting my sketching, but got a few pages filled anyway.


Afterwards I walked down to Klostertorv where they made a beach in the square - cobblestones all covered by a thick layer of sand, and lots of cosy little huts to give a bit of shelter. I picked one and sketched across a few more pages.


Then I moved on up to Lille Torv and Immervad, and sketched from various locations, ending up under an overhang to shelter from more drizzle.




I finished up down by Bispetorv, where I realised I was both tired and hungry and decided to catch a bus back home.


Quite a productive day. I'll go back during the week to fill the rest of the accordion sketchbook with more drawings from the festival, and work on figuring out how to draw crowds!

0.4 mm ink pen and grey brush marker in pocket accordion moleskine.

Watercolour sketchbook

So, last night I used up the last page in my watercolour sketchbook. I already have a larger one lined up to take over, and hope to begin it tomorrow in town.



The new one is an A4 size sketchbook, and it opens up to a long or tall double spread, depending on orientation. Lots of room for playing with formats.

In the meantime there are still lots of sketches from the completed sketchbook that I haven't shared. Here is a selection of drawings with tea in the subject:







Still experimenting and fooling around without too much of an idea what I am trying to do here, except gather experiences with the medium. My Flickr stream is looking a lot more colourful these days with all the watercolours.

Book

This book on urban sketching, by Urban Sketchers founder Gabriel Campanario, will be out in February 2012, and I will be in it!



Read more about the book on the Facebook page.

I really look forward to having this on my shelf, with art by a whole lot of talented sketchers from around the globe ready to inspire and motivate me to go out and sketch more.

Saturday grocery shopping

Sketched this in the parking lot, looking through the windscreen.



Ink pens in pocket moleskine sketchbook.

DHL relay race

Went to the race in Mindeparken with my job on Thursday, taking part in the walk while others ran the relay.







Watercolour, waterbrush and watercolour pencils in sketchbook.

Behind

I am falling behind on blogging (and answering emails, and returning calls, and...), and rather than trying to catch up right now, let me just share yesterday's sketchbreak at the new cafe right by my stop in town.

Here is my table - I snagged an armchair and had a cup of roiboos


The interior is quite nice, and brighter than I expected since the cafe itself is partly below street level. Here's a look towards the street windows


I will no doubt be sketching this cafe repeatedly as it gets colder and wetter - it's the perfect place to wait for the next bus. Next time I'll pick a different seat and draw a view of the interior.



Watercolour and watercolour pencils in medium sized moleskine sketchbook - I just bought a large one to experiment in when this one is full. Only two pages left.

Back

Well, I fell into a crochet hole after that baby-visit.





And I was also a bit overwhelmed by all the Lisbon photos on my harddrive - just looking through all of them has taken forever, and although there are lots worth sharing, I really don't want to flood my Flickr stream with pages and pages of symposium photos. I'll look into creating an online album somewhere else, and then link to that.

I really enjoyed meeting so many sketchers in Lisbon, and also finally meeting in person people I have been following and interacting with online over the past 3 years or so. Being me, I needed a bit of time off in between all the activities - just being with that many people for days on end was quite overwhelming - and I spent part of each day doing something on my own or just resting. Although most of the workshops were really good and well organised I was really more interested in seeing people work (and teach), and if I get a second chance at a symposium I will probably prioritise the lectures over taking part in workshops - I missed at least half of them this time around.

Seeing Marina Grechanik sketch in watercolours was a bit of a revelation, and I realised the watercolour pencil was a great way to get that line back in. Line is where I feel at home, whereas colour makes me uncertain so paints are quite intimidating on their own! Ink pen with watercolour wash tends to become more of a colouring book technique with me - just filling in the shapes after the drawing is done - and then I'd rather just draw in pens alone, but working with watercolour and watercolour pencils at once is very interesting. The pencil can be used on both wet and dry surface, with different characteristics, and reworked with wet washes on top. I'm still just in the beginning stages of experimenting, and having lots of fun with it. You can see my sketches of a friend and her baby in the preceding entry, and here are some sketchbook journal entries in my little watercolour Moleskine - I will be posting more over the next few days as I already have quite a few to share.







Meeting other artists and working with them is very inspiring.