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