Use your fingers to create art

All you need is some watercolour or ink and some markers to make your own animals! Take a look here:


Let's Make some Great Fingerprint Art from Marion Deuchars on Vimeo.

Anything is possible with just these few tools. :)

Against all odds

This video gives me shivers down my spine every time I watch it. There is such a great lesson to be learned here: When everyone judges you by just their first impression, they can be seriously mislead. It is up to you to astonish them.

And don't forget: dream big and never give up!

(You need to clik on the video to watch it on YouTube itself and wait untill after the commercial. But it's really worth it!)

Summer Colours Week 2012: Blue

And finally the colour Blue for the Summer Colours Week of 2012. A good summer is filled with bright blue skies. And this gate and these shutters brighten up any day in any season, a tiny garden between 2 larger houses. This is anothe picture from my trip to Honfleur, a small French village. Enjoy summer!

Summer Colours Week 2012: Red

Red is the fourth summer colour of this week, celebrating the bright and fun colours from summer. This picture was taken in the backstreets of Honfleur. It is a small French village filled with artists and galleries. But I loved to wander around beyond the main attractions of this place. Here, a bright red and white painted house. Who would not want to live here?

Summer Colours Week 2012: Pink

Wednesday will feature the colour pink in the Summer Colours Week 2012. This pansy really says it all: I am pink and I will stay pink forever...

Summer Colours Week 2012: Yellow

Tuesday, the second day of the Summer Colours Week, with yellow starring as the summer colour. Bright and warm, let's hope that summer is going to look like this soon.

Summer Colours Week 2012: Green

It should be summer by now, but the rain and the wind makes it look much like Autumn these days. But it does not matter, Summer has officially started and we will wait for the sun to come out!

This week Summer is being celebrated in blogland with a colour for each day. This first day, monday, the week starts with the colour green. This picture says it all: the green, green grass of home....

Water Colours in Sketchbook

And again, another page from my sketchbook. This time I used an old photograph as inspiration source. Love that splash of yellow in winter, don't you?
I remember taking the pictures in my mother's garden with my camera and macro lens. Just wandering around and snapping away. She never saw the photographs because by that time most of her eyesight was gone. This sketch is certainly not a masterpiece, but I love the way the memories came back of us being out there in her garden.

Sketch of Little Pitcher

Another watercolour sketch, this time from a small pitcher that I found at the back of the cupboard. First a rough sketch in pencil was made, then waterproof marker and finally the flower design. When everything was almost dry, I added the foreground and the background.

Small and easy, trying not to overthink it but enjoying the process. After all, it is just a little sketch. :-)

A Magical World

In January, nature was confused. New buds were sprouting up because of the mild weather, even some potted flowers began to show a few new flowers. But that all changed suddenly last week: heavy frost was predicted. And last friday we experienced our first snow fall, changing the barren, brown and boring landscape in a new and magical world.

Yesterday the sun was out, no cloud in the sky, the wind had laid down and I went out for a little walk to my favorite spots. I loved the sound of the snow undermeath my boots, the fresh cold on my face, the sparkling of the ice crystals in the snow resembling like hundreds of diamonds were scattered out.
It was just magical out there.

Another Page from my Sketchbook

Another page from my sketchbook. I have used very heavy water colour paper to make this sketchbook myself and I am happy to make good use of it now. The paper can handle a good deal of water, but the texture does show up over heavily in the scans!

Page From my Sketchbook

At the moment I am busy designing patterns mostly on the computer, but I really need to break away so now and then from the computer screen and work with paint, pencil, brushes and paper.
This is one of the sketches that I made from the rose hips that stand next to my house.

Every morning I have to get outside to open up the shutters and this rosebush stands between the two windows. It does not look pretty at all, the roses and leaves are gone, the branches are dark and bare, but if you look closely, the whimsical dried leaves from the rose hips make beautiful wirly shapes.

Too bad though, it does not matter how many sketches I make, whether in pencil, with a marker or in water colour, I just don't seem to be able to capture the whimsical beauty of these pretty swirly things. I need to sketch them more often untill I will get it right. :-) But that is the purpose of sketching: practise, practise, practise....

Pattern Design Published on the Print&Pattern Blog

Just found out that one of my pattern designs have been published on the famous Print&Pattern blog:
http://printpattern.blogspot.com/2012/01/surface-design-students.html

It is a simple pattern, made from a sketch of a leaf from my garden. Thanks to Laura Coyle's class about Adobe Illustrator (on reneepearson.com) I started using vector software again in my digital design work and rediscovered my love for designing patterns - I used to do textile design and web design in the past - and have now enrolled in a surface pattern design class. That keeps me so busy that I neglected this blog - sorry about that!

It is fun to see that one of my designs was good enough to be published on this blog that is all about surface pattern design! :-)

Christmas Book by Alan Anderson

A week ago, just before I got bitten by the flu bugs, this book arrived in the mail: The Christmas Sleigh. It is a very special book because the writer and illustrator is Alan Anderson, my brother in law!

I don't get often the chance to visit my sister and her family in the US, but every time I am there, Alan will be sitting with a sketchbook on his lap and drawing, drawing, drawing. I think he needs it as much as we all humans need water...
It is no wonder that he is incredible talented by hard work and practise. No wonder that he finally took a leap of faith and published his first book! Wow!

When I heard about it, I wondered how I could get my hands on a copy. And lo and behold, it was already available from the bookdepository.co.uk website - the website that I always use for ordering books since they do free shipping (all around the world) and has no additional costs for small orders.
Within 2 weeks the book had arrived and I felt that I needed to do something special with it. I took some photographs today and put them together into a little video to post on YouTube (and Vimeo and Flickr and uhhh Facebook....).

My apologies for the music, but I felt that I could not send out a video about christmas into cyberspace without any sound! :-)
I am just so incredible proud of this man, and of his book. The illustrations are so wonderful and I love the way he used colour in parts of the picture to attract the main attention and the background, still with all the thoughtful details, in shades of grey. And then the expression on the faces of the characters...

Though I am in the process of trying to sketch (almost) every day, I know that I will never achieve the level of art that he has achieved. But at least I can thoroughly enjoy it now with this book. Just wonder how I could get him to sign the book since he lives on the other side of the big ocean... LOL

Patience

Fresh Colour To Brighten Up Grey Days

Everyday, I receive an email from http://www.design-seeds.com/ in my emailbox with new colour palettes. It always feel like a kind of gift that you get to open: beautiful pictures with a palette of colours attached to it, chosen from the photograph.

Here is one I made myself. I loaded a photograph of the Little Guide Book into Photoshop and made this palette of colours myself. The colours in the photograph might not be as bright as they appear in the palette, but who said that I have to constrain myself to the exact colours? :-)
Just a little bit moving the cursor around in the Colour Picker of Photoshop and I got this beautiful bright set of colours.

Just what you need on these grey, dab days... Hope that these colours will make you smile today as well!

Raw Art Journal: the Elephant in the Room

 It has been a while that I have uploaded the new pages from my Art journal. The last few weeks I am busy with drawing and sketching, trying to develop a new habit and enjoy a bit of uncomplicated creativity every day.
And yes, I certainly need to brush up those drawing skills as well... :-) So that is a bonus as well!

This page is about "the elephant in the room". Something so obvious - there is no way you can't overlook an elephant in your room, can you - and the habit of ignoring it all together.

I have noticed the hard way that there are things that you get so used to, but are not really regarded as 'normal'. You just think it is 'normal' cause you are so used to it for many, many years. It has become a part of your life. It has become normal for me to have that elephant sitting in my room.

But it is not normal. Absolutely not. And I have to see that elephant for what it is: an elephant. Something so big that I can't overlook it. Eventhough it is sometimes hard to acknowledge it. I need to recognise that elephant, knowing that even if I don't speak about it, or are not allowed to speak about it, it is still there.
Undeniable, obvious and present. This page will help me to remember that...

So the question for you is, how many elephants are there in your room? Are there things in your life that you'd rather not speak about? Do you have the courage to acknowledge them and start a converstation about it? Or do you just ignore it?

Gouache Paint and Memories of Art Class

While I am (hopefully) wrapping up most of the paperwork of the past weeks, I am going through my art materials and experimenting with the old art materials I have lying around for years now.
Most of the time I prefer to work with acrylic paint because of all the layering that I can add on top of each layer of paint. But on the other hand I would like to work quicker and not having to deal with these big jars and palets with drying paint that is then unusable.

So I took out my tubes of gouache paint. While I was adding colours to my palet (one where they can dry and then hopefully be re-used by adding water again), memories of my schooldays immediately popped up in my head.
It was in this art class that I first used this kind of paint, the one that comes from tubes or pots. We learned to sketch, learned calligraphy with different pens, made posters and even learned to do hand lettering with this paint.

And I still remember that I always had a problem to add the right amount of water so that the paint would cover the white of the paper - the teacher would not approve of transparant paint in our work - but still be fluid enough to paint nice letters. Back in these days we had no computers to make our fonts, so we learned to draw them with pencil on paper with T-rulers and  set squares and then coloured them with paint. A very labour-intensive job, but I loved to lay down the colours and turning a plain white paper into a little piece of art.

In a small container I found some very old tubes of gouache and some newer ones. One of them was completely dried up. So with a sharp knife I cut through the metal of the tube and put the paint on the palet.
This way I can still use it (like a pan) and don't have to throw it away.

In a seperate small sketchbooks I painted swatches of all the colours that I have. While I had no reasons to add new colours while I was working with watercolours earlier this year ( see: How many colours do you need ), I think I need some new ones for gouache... I definitly need some extra red, purple, green and a light blue. Maybe even some grey? :-)

I am looking forward to try drawing over the paint with coloured pencils (mixing media as usual) and I might try to do some handlettering as well, something I learned from this teacher as well. Though I might want to try updating the look of these letters though... :-)

Absorbed by Digital Design

One of the challenging bits as a mother of special needs children is the enormous amount of paperwork that has to be processed when something changes in their lives. It is unbelievable what you have to do to make things work out.

You have to bury yourselves in papers that have to be completely read and understood, find the little 'snakes underneath the grass', research internet thoroughly to make sure that you know almost as much as the help line operators of the organisations with which you have to deal with. And of course, it is just not one organisation, there are often at least three different ones!

And did I mention the amount of papers you have to read (and reread cause you simply get confused)?

So it was very refreshing for me to be distracted and getting totally absorbed by the online Illustrator 2 Class with Laura Coyle on www.reneepearson.com.

It has been a while that I had taken a class on anything digital for a while. Working with mixed media and getting my hands literally dirty was working just fine for me at this moment in my life.
But am I glad that I signed up! This class was so inspirational, the teaching was superb and I learned so much. Which is a great achievement for any teacher since I have been working with digital design and software for decades.

Laura really got us absorbed in Illustrator. There was a huge amount of instructional videoos, but not just techniques and how tools worked, but she got us busy from the first few videoos on, which I just loved. Ideas were running around in my head and I could not keep up with that flow!
The promise of getting my hands dirty in Illustrator helped me to get through all the heaps of papers and rules.

And I even skipped yoga classes 3 weeks in a row to enjoy the live chat we had in which Laura gave mini demonstrations and answered our questions right on the spot. Never done that before...

As usual, the online classes from Renee Pearson are of high quality. High quality video and sound, great website, prompt messages about the posting of lessons and extremely quick responses to any technical difficulty that you encounter.

The teacher, Laura Coyle is a professional illustrator and designer and is a great skilled teacher. Chek out her art work and blog here: http://www.coyleart.typepad.com

She offers  several classes and is preparing a new one for Illustrator Brushes in december. To keep informed, make sure to sign up for the newsletter from www.reneeparson.com for info about upcoming classes, live chats and sometimes great discounts for limited time for some of the classes.

There is still a lot of paperwork to be done, which I absolutely start to hate (a word which I hardly use but is the one word appropriate for the situation). Papers seem to be scattered all around the floor in my little workroom (but believe me, there is some kind of a system in it) but I love the escape that I have rediscovered: designing digitally and letting my ideas run wild!

Marit's Big Surprise

Marit, a Dutch Mixed Media Artist, Art Journaler, Photographer and Haiku writer, surprised everyone last sunday with the news that she is starting her own magazine: Featuring.
It will be a printed magazine, in English, and the first issue will be published in Spring 2012. Can you believe it?
I am so happy for her with this new adventure.

Read more about this terrific news at: http://www.featuringmagazine.com/
You can also sign up on that website to be kept informed about the birth of that magazine. I am looking forward to the first issue!