Wine Label

Family of mine own an old vineyard In Portugal. They asked me to design a label for this years white and red wine. I love this! I started with a label for the white wine, I will be experimenting with more designs and drawings!
The pink flower on the left above is the bougainville,  beautifully growing in the area of the vineyard and the bottle is an example of an old wine bottle that was recently discovered at an attic at the house at the vineyard.

Creative Courage e-course

I'm very much looking forward to the start of the "Creative Courage' e-course I will be following! The start of it is tomorrow! http://www.stephanielevy.blogspot.de/p/e-courses.html

Winter Time

It might be a little early...but yesterday evening I found myself drawing a wintery scene...
Like most of the drawings I start...I didn't plan it this way. I just started the drawing of this girl and then I got the idea to add the snowflakes. To me it looks a like a very cosy, winterscene now. I'm thinking about maybe turning this into a christmas-card. What do you think? It's september so I started just in time to think about Christmas ;-).

New and Old

Changed the look of this blog a bit. I needed a little change. :-)
Here's a drawing I did a couple of months ago with a little paper-collage piece in it. Can you see what's the paper-part? ;-)
My approach in this drawing was: Just draw what I want to draw, not with a specific idea about what I want to express. "Thinking about what to do" is a line I added afterwards; words to match the feeling that appeared  in the drawing.

A Rose

A rose in coloured pencil and Artist Pitt Pen on tinted paper. First the drawing was on a larger size tinted paper. While writing the words in Indian Ink, I made a stain. I decided to cut out the rose, wrote the text again and glued the drawing on a another piece of paper.
I like Emily Bronte's words:
'But he that dares not grasp the thorn
should never crave the rose.'
My interpretation: if you really want something you're passionate about, you have to deal with the risks and the possibility of getting hurt. But it's worth it!
A lovely reminder to keep in mind in life to always follow your heart, even if you're scared.

Anastassia Elias

Loooove the work of Anastassia Elias.
This collage-piece is amazing.
http://blog.anastassia-elias.com/2007/07/25/entonnoir/

Lily's Magic Books

A while ago I finished a class that I followed: Visual Journaling. I followed this course at http://camp.pikaland.com/. The assignments were about character and idea development and as a result I came up with Lily, a 7 year old girl, living in the seventies, with her parents and cat Peppermint above the bookstore they own in Amsterdam. (If you would like to read about earlier posts about this, click on the tag/label 'visual journal' on the left side of the page.)
These are my final results. The assignment was to pick one scene and draw different versions of this; in black and white, two colors, and an abstract one. As the story also takes place in New York, where Lily magicly goes when she opens a book one night, we had to draw food related to the story and place.
I should finish the complete story because I have the idea in my head. Now I only have to follow through...;-).

A Funny Little Story

Illustrative journaling: Telling a little story by an illustration/drawing and some words.
Here's one about about something that made me smile yesterday.
My camera is so crappy by the way. I hate this. I need either a scanner or a good camera! Or both! I need sponsoring because I'm a poor artist! ;-)
You should be able to read the little story if you'd like to,  by clicking on the picture for a larger image.

My Cup of Tea

I bought a watercolour sketchbook yesterday, and some waterolour paint. When I see other peoples work in watercolour, I like the effect you can achieve with it. I'm not experienced in working with it, but I thought: let's give it a try. And it's always so much fun to go to the art-supplies store and buy some new stuff to experiment with.
So this is yesterday's watercolours result! I must say I like how it worked out. It's done in watercolour, Chinese Ink for the text and some coloured pencil and Faber-Castell Artist Pitt pen.

Experimenting

I'm experimenting with a lot of different illustration- and drawing styles. Still didn't develop 1 particular style yet. There is so much I like!
This is a drawing I did today.
It's done in ink.

Drawing a man

I love drawing people. I almost always draw women. I don't know why. Somehow I like drawing women more, maybe because I find this easier and because when I ocassionaly try to draw a man, they end up looking like a woman, or something in between ;-) after all.
But I like men, so I want to be able to draw them! Here is my latest attempt to draw a man. I'm satisfied with the result, he looks like a man...but....I still see something feminine in it! I can't really point my finger at what it is. But my maybe that's just my own imagination ;-).
I need to do some ear-drawing-exercise too by the way.
I did this in Chinese Ink and a FaberCastell Pitt artist pen and I used a magazine picture as reference.

Green Dress

Yesterday I wrote something about not feeling like drawing for a couple of days. Felt really sad about a love-thing. Still I decided to buy a green dress I saw, I just felt I had to do that. Somehow it became a sort of symbol for me for choosing the things in life that I want and most importantly, that the choices I"ll make will be about enjoying and loving life. And share those feelings with other people too, not only keeping them to myself too much ;-). And the dress wasn't even expensive:-D.
Since the dress became a little symbol, I decided to draw it. It's a brighter green in reality, but that's the artists freedom;-).
It's done in coloured pencil, regular pencil and a Copic multiliner in brown.

Haven't felt like drawing these days, I got  a personal thing going on, and somehow I can't draw at the moment, don't feel like it at all. For now a few inspirational quotes. I will get back to the drawing-business ;-) in a couple of days hopefully...
Saw these here:  http://charlottevallance.blogspot.nl/

Two new butterfly drawings in my little moleskine sketchbook.

Yesterdays post was about a few nature drawings I started in a little moleskine sketchbook.
Today some pictures of the old biologybooks my father gave me, which I used as inspiration. I like those old-fashioned drawings.
So I somewhat copied the drawings I showed you yesterday. The yellow butterfly I saw on a postcard of which I like the illustration style a lot. Sometimes I feel guilty when I copy someone else style : " I should have my own style, and invent a style of my own!" But then I think of a quote from Leonardo da Vinci: " If one knows how to copy, one knows how to do it."  Practice, practice, practice, and your own style will develop eventually!
This quote I read in a book from Carla Sonheim with 52 drawing exercises to make drawing fun. This book really is fun! To loosen up and make you think of drawing in a fun and different way!