Diary

Cold

| Lo Granqvist

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:cold.jpg

Have a great day!

Embla

Oh, and this is now submitted to the february #ccbchallenge
Join it and see what happens :D

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Hair-experiments

| Lo Granqvist

Yesterday I got myself some new watercolor-papers. It’s a kind I’ve never used before, so the first thing I did was a few experiments. Normally, I would just make a few boring circles, just to see how the paper handles the colors, but I thought: Why waste expensive papers on something so boring? Especially since I also bought a certain pen. A white gelly-roll pen that I have been eyeballing in the art supplies-store for a whole year, but never could afford. Ok, I guess I could have afforded it, but I mean, $7 for a PEN? What kind of crazy person would ever buy such a thing??
Well, after always fighting with painting around all the white areas, and seeing what other artists easily could achieve with this pen, I finally went ahead and spoiled myself with one.
Here is the result of my first go with the new pen and paper(and watercolors of course): a little page with hair-experiments:
Hair.jpg
It’s not the best work I’ve ever done. I only like the red and blue one. But I look forward to find new ways to use this. The paper quality is great and the pen is just amazing!
Totally worth eating oatmeal for a week to make up for the budget-gap.

Let me know if you like them and I’ll make some more :)

Have a great day!

Embla

All of my trees

| Lo Granqvist

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I think that most people who draws and paints has this one certain motive that keeps coming back to them. It might be that one thing that never quite turns out right, or just the go-to motive when there’s no other inspiration. For me, that thing is trees. Or, treehouses. I have this particular image of the thick trunked tree, with almost bare branches, and a little house and ladder. I’m not quite sure why I keep on painting it. I just do. I guess it represents something about myself that I haven’t really found yet. I know that it is very personal, and I think that is the reason to why so many others have appreciated it. I’ve even had a few clients wanting me to make one for them.
The first one I ever made was this one:treehouse

Not that fancy, and I didn’t put much effort into it. After it was finished, I didn’t think much of it. Like most other paintings, it was forgotten in a folder somewhere.
But after a while it kept coming back.
I started making tons of small sketches. These are just the ones I could find, but there are many more.

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Treesketch67.JPGGhosttree.jpgTreesketch345.JPG

 

I made more paintings:
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Different versions:
treehousesraettraedhouses

This one is the latest:
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As you can tell, I have significantly improved my painting skills since that first one.(or at least, my patience)  Somehow, I still feel as if it’s not quite right yet.  I guess that I’ll just keep on painting it, and hopefully I’ll someday find out what it’s all about.

I’d love to know which one of these you like the most.
Or hate the least. Everyone has a different taste :)

Christmas

| Lo Granqvist

Hello!
So here is my first diary-post.
I wanted to tell you a bit about my christmas, and show you a page from my “diary”. It looks like this:
2149.jpgNow, this is a very romanticised depiction of what was really going on.

This christmas, me, my two younger brothers and our mom got together in her house. We all live very far away from each other, so we rarely get together, and it’s so much fun when we do. But it’s also quite chaotic.
Here’s how it all went down:
Mom’s cats have been chasing my dog, my dog has been chasing mom’s chickens, meatballs burned, little brother crying, nervous cats starts peeing inside, other brother demanding lunch, the firewood is wet, the game-night is less about answering questions and more about yelling at each other about whether Israel is in Europe, Africa or Asia, and my boyfriend couldn’t be happier about staying at home this year.
But believe it or not, we all survived and even managed to do all the weird, mandatory, swedish christmas-things, like eating raw fish and writing poems to go along with christmas gifts. We might give it a try again next year.
For now, I’m happy to be back to my quiet camping wagon, where the days rarely get more chaotic than this:

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