Ok, so I have time for a small one.
I realized after last post that I definitely need more practice drawing people, and especially animals, from behind. So here’s a sketch I made on the bus. It’s inspired by my neighbor, always seen carrying something, and followed by a bunch of cats.
Have a nice sunday!
Hi guys! Today I’ve been working on a small experiment.
Again, inspired by the nice weather, I wanted to depict our morning walk in the mist, and I wanted to use my masking fluid, or drawing gum or whatever it’s called.
It’s not like this is an experiment in the sense of this being something completely new.(I have obviously used masking fluid before)
But it felt like an experiment because I haven’t used the masking fluid on this paper before, and instead of just covering one small detail with the fluid, I was going to cover almost the whole page, and I was going to do it in a different order than I normally do.
So here’s the first step. I loosely drew up the scene in pencil, and inked the characters.
Step two. Here’s where it gets different, because normally I would ink the whole thing before putting anything else on there. But now there’s masking fluid all over the place.
I’m pretty sure it’s made for water based colors, so I had no idea how it would handle being drawn on with an ink-pen.
Ok, so it seems all right so far. The rest of the ink is on, and the masking fluid didn’t really suffer from it. I think. I can’t be completely sure until I try peeling it off.
Step four. The watercolors. Nothing special here. Just coloring like I always do.
And so the masking fluid gone.
It actually was amazingly easy to get it off. It didn’t rip the paper, and the ink stayed in the right place.
Just a few extra details on top of that and it’s all done!
It didn’t turn out just as I had imagined, but does it ever? I’m pretty happy to have found out how well the masking fluid works with this paper, and I’m sure I’ll be using it more.
I’ll be working with paintings kid’s faces in a mall the whole weekend. I’m super excited and nervous about it, but it’s probably going to work out just fine. I wish I could take photos of it, but I’m pretty sure it’s very indecent of me to exploit other people’s children on the internet(If I ever get kids of my own, I promise their sole purpose in life will be showing off my face-painting skills). So you won’t be seeing anything about that.
I just wanted to let you know why I won’t be posting or mailing or anything the next couple of days.
Have a nice weekend y’all!
Embla
Yesterday’s personal project was inspired by the fantastic weather.
I was really bummed about not having a camera with me on the morning walk, because the whole forest was shimmering and I wanted to paint everything I saw. Unfortunately my photographic memory is really lousy. Like, embarrassingly lousy for an artist. So these painting doesn’t even get close to representing the beautiful day.
Next time I’ll bring a camera.
Morning Evening
Have a great day!
Embla
Hello! Here’s a little painting I made a few weeks ago, in different stages.
Just for fun.
Hope that you like them, and that you’re having a great day!
Embla
The past weeks I’ve been getting a lot of work involving depicting photographs. Usually when a commission involves a photo, it’s more about artistic interpretations of them, but lately I’ve been doing a lot of realistic depictions.
This is something that I haven’t done much before I started doing commissions, and I still never do it unless it’s for a job. Because, honestly, it’s a little boring.
For me, the fun part in painting is to make something that wasn’t there before, and while copying surely is a challenge, it’s just not the same.
Nevertheless, these commissions are always very welcome, as it is such good practice for me.
Here are some paintings I’ve done recently for different clients:
For a blog
For commercial purposes
Birthday party invite
For an article
For personal use
The best thing about depicting photos is the awesome sense of accomplishment when it’s finished. Not only because it takes a long time, but also because I’m always happily surprised by the result. Like “wow, did I just make this??”.
When making all the childish cartoony stuff that I do, I easily fall into self doubt. I can feel that my work is too simple, that my success is undeserved and that I’m not a “real” artist. But creating paintings like these makes me realize that I can actually do things other than just cute doodles.
So, these commissions are great for practice, and most of all, they’re great for boosting my confidence.
Thanks to all my lovely clients for trusting me with your projects!
Hope y’all are having a great day!
Embla
Good morning!
I want to show you a project that I worked on in November, for a musician named Dave Crosby.(not the older, bearded guy, but the other, younger, clean shaven Dave Crosby)
I was really excited about the description I got, which was something like: “a dark monster hanging up eyeballs on a line, above him a ‘swirly’ sky(with faces in it) and it’s as if it’s exploding into space”. Ok, that sounds really confusing, but he had some reference pictures along with the description, so it was easier to figure out than it sounds.
The reason I was so excited about it is because most of my commissions are either really sweet things for children, or it’s depicting photographs. It’s not at all like I don’t enjoy those jobs, but a dark and scary picture is always like a welcomed break from all the cute stuff.
Here’s how the painting turned out:
This was for an album cover, and naturally, I thought the music was something hard and loud, but I was surprised to learn that it was a pretty mellow singer/songwriter who ordered the painting.
As it was for an album, Dave thought it could be cool if his name was written in the swirls. So he ordered another one, with a few other changes as well. Quite a hard task, but I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out. As I had gotten a lot of practice on the first one, this one looks a lot cleaner, don’t you think?
When looking up his youtube channel, to share with you guys, I realized that this is the guy who just went viral, with the video of him and his young daughter playing ‘you’ve got a friend in me’. If you’ve seen it, you know exactly what I’m talking about.
Such a contrast, between these creepy paintings and that most adorable video the internet has seen since, well.. The last adorable viral video I guess…
You can find his youtube channel HERE
And the newly released EP is HERE
Have a great day!
Embla
Hello everyone!
This weekend I’m spending at mom’s house, which is always a great place for inspiration for me, so you’ll probably see something about what I come up with here sooner or later. But for now, I’m pretty excited about a few old sketchbooks that I found! The past seven years, my life has been pretty chaotic. I’ve been moving around a LOT. Not only have I been living in real apartments, but also in old workshops, camping wagons, and I was even homeless for a while. Which means that a lot of my old work is gone forever. But it shows that I’ve managed to dump a part of it at my mom’s.
So here is a (in comparison) small selection of stuff I made three or four years ago:
There was a lot of portraits going on. I wasn’t so good at faces back then, so I had much practice to do.
This was the time where I started getting really interested in the inside of the body. Which resulted in some pretty gross stuff. I won’t be showing you the worst.
Obviously, I hadn’t really had a closer look at those kinds of private parts back then…
Some bugs and edible plants.
I still have the idea of making a book with edible and medicinal plants, but that would take an incredible amount of research and planning, so if I ever make it happen, it won’t be for many years.
Naturally, next is animals:
A huge amount of jellyfish were produced here, as well as octopuses and fish.
And… um.. Something animal-ish:
I was also aspiring to be a circus artist, so I did a lot of sketching of my class-mates. Unfortunately, most of it in pencil, so that’s all just a big, gray, blurry mess now. Here’s what’s left.
Some drawings of my friends doing a show:
And a drawing of me and my flyer: (flyer as in the small person being thrown around in hand to hand acrobatics)
Then, there’s a bunch of stuff that’s not so easy to categorize:
Some pretty terrifying dreams I had:
And lastly, here are some places where I used to hang out:
My first camping wagon.
And my flyer in the hammock outside of the wagon.
A friends apartment where I spent a lot of time.
And the old workshop where I lived for a while.
I don’t know if you can see that, or if it’s just me, but I realize now that a lot of these are kind of gray and sad. That’s because I was very depressed at the time, so I can see a lot of traces from that here. No worries though, as I’m happier than ever nowadays :)
I have a plan to remake some of these. I think it would be a lot of fun to see the development, what’s changed and what’s still the same.
What do you guys think? Is that something you might be interested in seeing?
Have a great day!
Embla
Hi again! I’ve been doing a lot of tryouts on my new papers, and I thought I should show you the ones that didn’t turn out too horrible.
This new paper does not handle the paint the same way my old papers did. It is actually a lot better in many ways, but it still means that I need to get used to it. So I cut out a few long pieces, and my challenge to myself was to make something completely different on each one. This is the result:
This was a lot of fun to make. Even though it’s a little creepy and depressing. I had to force myself to let go of that ink-pen and let it do whatever it wanted. I think it turned out pretty good. Especially with the color “flowering” like that, up in the right corner. My old paper couldn’t do that. Now I just have to learn how to control it.
Here I wanted to see how the paper would handle my masking fluid(it’s like a floating rubber, which dries when painted on the paper, and then you can paint over it, peel it off and it leaves a blank space) Many papers can’t handle it, and the masking fluid just rips up the paper, but this one does a great job! In case you’re unsure, it’s the white in the water and the trees that were “masked”. Again, that flowering-thing the color does in the sky, I love it!
And another creepy one. My first attempt ever to paint fog. It didn’t go just as great as I had hoped, but still better than I expected.
I hope you like them :)
Embla
Living in a camping wagon really isn’t so bad. You get used to it pretty quickly. The crowded space where only one person at a time can be up walking around, and climbing over each other to get into the sofa. The way of cooking a meal on a tiny space with only one hotplate and a tiny, tiny oven. The heavy chore of fetching water in a big can… Even emptying the toilet every third day doesn’t seem that gross after a while.
There’s just one thing that you don’t really get used to. The cold.
This is my second wagon. The first one I lived in was up in Sweden, where it’s a lot colder than it is here in Denmark. Up there I used to wake up to find my water frozen, so I couldn’t get my morning coffee. BUT, the one I lived in in Sweden was pretty ok when it came to insulation. If I heated it up, it stayed warm. This one, however, has wind running through every window, no matter how much tape we’ve tried fixing them with. This means that no matter how long the radiator is on, it never really gets warm, as the heat blows right out the windows.
So here I sit, struggling to paint because of cold fingers and big (obviously useless) mittens. Luckily I’ve got both a dog and a dude to keep me warm in the nights, so I think I’ll survive this winter too. Just a few more months to go!
Here’s my cold self portrait in ink and watercolor:
Have a great day!
Embla
Oh, and this is now submitted to the february #ccbchallenge
Join it and see what happens :D
Knyttir 