Hello to everyone and anyone stopping by! Happy Friday! Today I played with the gouache cups and drew on more of them to create a larger collection. Here they are!
Hope you like them. I still want to make some plants, so perhaps I'll get around to that tomorrow. :)
Hello, and Happy Thursday! Today I played with gouache and painted some teacups and coffee cups and mugs and so on. Basically, containers with a single handle. Then I added some linework digitally. I want to make a teacup garden, so I'm thinking that I'll work next on adding little plants growing out of the cups... Yes, I think that would be very fun, indeed!
I'll be back tomorrow with some more fun, so have a great Friday and check back tomorrow! :)
Happy Wednesday! Today I played with green gouache and metallic gold ink. I made a pattern, which I think is very lovely and would be great as a paper, or as a surface design for products if it could be foiled with gold foil or printed with metallic ink. I'll be back tomorrow to play more. Have a great rest of your day!
Hi, friends! Happy Tuesday! Today I painted with gouache onto a swatch of indigo watercolor I'd painted a while ago. The way the watercolor dried made me think of a winter scene, so I started to paint a winter scene. I know that the arctic fox would be more appropriate for iceland, but the red fox looked so much better against the snow. :)
I hope you have a great day! I'll be making something new tomorrow, so feel free to visit again! :)
Hello, friends! Today I gave myself half an hour to play with my art materials. No planning, no sketching... just spontaneous sloth making! I used watercolor, then gouache, then watercolor crayons I had forgotten I even had, and then pencil. Super fun, super fast, and very playful!
Hope you have a great rest of your Monday! I'll be back tomorrow with something new to share!
Howdy, folks! Today I worked a bit more on my chair with cats, or cats with chair. I still don't think it is finished, but I'm liking it more and more. Let me know what you think. I'm still thinking of adding a pattern to the chair upholstery. For some reason I love pink in combination with pea green. I'm not sure why I love it so, but I do.
Here is what my gouache looked like as I was working. I thought it was pretty, so I took a picture.
I'll do something new tomorrow, so check back to see what it is. :)
Hello, friends! Today, in between working on illustrations that are due early next week and watching a Norwegian relative of mine win silver in a karate competition, I decided to draw a chair and some cats. It is Caturday, after all. I had a scrap of rough watercolor paper to use, so I drew with a pencil and painted the pink background in gouache. This is a work-in-progress, so I think I will play some more with it tomorrow. I am unsure about how much I want to paint and how much of the graphite I want to leave showing. So far, I like the graphite on the chair and I'm considering drawing a pattern on the upholstery. I'll decide tomorrow, I guess. :)
Have a great day! And check back tomorrow to see what more I end up doing with this piece. :)
Happy Friday, friends! Today was a windy and chilly day in Reykjavik. I got to spend a few hours with some of my Norwegian relatives who flew in today for a karate competition happening in town tomorrow. It was so fun to see them, speak some Norwegian, and show them around a bit. Later today I took down my work that was on display for a month at Mokka Kaffi. It was fun to have my paintings and drawings up for so long, and I look forward to perhaps someday having my own show somewhere in town.
I didn't give myself as much time to play today as yesterday, but I still managed to doodle and make some patterns. I had a couple scraps in my studio of my favorite paper (300 lb. Fabriano Hot Press Watercolor Paper in Bright White) that I had painted yellow and blue, so I painted one with gouache and drew on the yellow piece with shiny white ink and graphite. I haven't used graphite in combination with white ink like this before, but I liked the result. It was a fun way to make the shiny ink pop from the background, adding a little more dimension to it.
I'm looking forward to putting on pajamas and curling up in a blanket for the rest of the evening, listening to the weather get worse and worse. It is already lightly snowing and the wind is howling outside, but it is supposed to get worse later on. Inside is the place to be. Perhaps I'll bake some delicious cookies, too. That sounds good to me!
I'll be back tomorrow with something playful and new. Have a great weekend, everyone! :)
Hello, friends! Today I had some more fun with gouache. I decided to paint a little scene that would incorporate a lot of things I love, like hedgehogs, birds, mushrooms, inchworms, moss, berries, greenery and flowers. I'm really happy with how it turned out. I used a pretty small brush, but not my smallest brush, and I was able to get quite a bit of detail into it. The painting is just a wee bit over two inches in diameter, which somehow makes it seem even more precious to me.
Because my scanner is not working very well at the moment, and my nice camera is en route to Iceland after being fixed abroad, my phone's photos will have to suffice. :)
Tomorrow I will have something new to share, though I don't yet know what it will be, so check back soon. Thanks for stopping by! :)
Well, today is the eighth day of my April Project. I thought I'd get back to basics, abandon my computer for a bit, and pull out some gouache paints. I kept it simple and painted some floral designs, which I think I'll turn into a pattern later. Turn in tomorrow for another playful something! :)
I worked for a while on making the green vessels into a wall-worthy piece, completing any of the vases that went off the edge of the scrap of paper I was painting on. I turned it into a repeating pattern, which I really like. The print is now available in my Society 6 shop, and there is free shipping right now on some items, including prints, so feel free to check it out. I'll make more color options available in time.
To finish off these vases, I added a few to fill in the gaps. I drew a mermaid on a vase, and I fell in love with her.
I decided to make her into her own piece. I didn't have much time to devote to her, but this is where she's at. I'd love to play with surrounding her with coral and fish...
Thanks for tuning in! I'll have something new to share tomorrow. :)
So, yesterday I had fun painting and decorating a variety of vases and vessels. Today I played around with photoshop, changing colors and making various adjustments. Here are some of the resulting variations. Click on any image below to page through these variations on a theme. Which do you like best?
Tomorrow I think I will start fresh with something new. I don't yet know what, but it will be fun!
After yesterdays painted portrait, I decided to loosen up and start painting without a plan. The result? This.
I must really love vases and vessels and teapots and footed bowls because those were the shapes I started to paint. I nested them into the negative spaces between the others, and the resulting painting looks like it wants to be a pattern.
I scanned the painting and added rough white linework digitally. This is how it turned out.
This Easter I painted and decorated vessels, not eggs. It was really fun to play and create without a plan. :) I hope you have a great day and I'll be back tomorrow to play and share more art with you. Perhaps I'll even branch out into different color palettes?
Hello again! Happy Saturday! Because I posted something black and white for the past two days, I thought I would create something in color today. I wanted to paint something for my friends, Petra and Gunnar. It was Petra's birthday last weekend, so I wanted to make something to belatedly mark the occasion. I looked for a photo of them and then created a little painted portrait in gouache, and I made the background in Petra's favorite color, too.
I know this is not the most playful, loose, or experimental piece, so I'll return to that playfulness tomorrow. It felt good, though, to create a piece from sketch to final in a relatively short period of time. Of course, in this relatively short period of time I went through every possible feeling about my work. At first I am either nervous or excited, but partway through working on a project I am certain everything I have done is terrible and I won't be able to do it. Then I'll think I am terrible and won't be able to do it. I will either step away for a time or I'll persist, cursing under my breath and audibly sighing until once again I like what I see in front of me, relieved. If you are an artist, I know you understand this pattern well, whether or not it matches yours. Loosening up and playing is actually a challenge, as funny as that sounds. It is a privilege, of course, but it is also a challenge. And this month long project is a great way for me to strengthen my playfulness and lighten the heavy burdens of high expectations I place upon myself before I ever begin.
Have a great day and a wonderful weekend, and check back to see what kind of playful mess I might unapologetically make tomorrow. :)
I guess I really must have enjoyed drawing potted plants, because here I am, day three of my playful daily art posting project, still doodling potted plants! What can I say? I enjoy it.
Just for fun, I put yesterdays drawing together with todays drawing. I like it. I could just keep going and going, but to keep being playful this month, I will have to switch mediums and see what new things I can come up with, too.
Perhaps I will do something with colors tomorrow? I've really enjoyed the simplicity of pen and paper, though. I made me feel like I could just play and doodle without thinking too much. Well, have a great weekend and if you check back tomorrow, there will be something new for you to see! Don't know what, but something. I'm really enjoying this! See you soon!
Hello! Day Two of this fun daily challenge! I found myself doodling happily at the nearby cafe this morning, and the resulting drawing is my playful piece for today. Here in Iceland, I don't own any plants, but in my previous life I surrounded myself with potted plants and hanging plants. I love plants, but for some reason, we have never purchased a plant here. Perhaps my drawing shows just how much I love and miss my plants in Minnesota, who are being cared for by many different friends and family members. And maybe it is about time we purchase a plant or two here, as well.
Feel free to click the image to see a larger version. Enjoy, and see you tomorrow! :)
Yes, that's right! It's the New Year's Day of the Julian calendar! It's the day that makes people who are celebrating the new year look like fools, hence April Fool's Day is also today.
Because the old new year is starting, I am making an old new year's resolution. Every single day this month I will post a new piece of art. Please hold me accountable. Not every piece will be something amazing, but rather I am trying to loosen up and play this month. I will set aside some time to be playful and creative and experiment, and I will share it all right here on my blog and on my instagram. Feel free to follow along, friends!
Because of the French tradition of Poisson d'Avril, (April Fish), I have decided to post these watercolor fish I just made. I will likely develop this piece further another day, but to start the old new year right, I simply needed to post whatever I have to show you today! :)
If you want a laugh, look through these... Happy April Fish!
Every March 5th, my dad celebrates the anniversary of the day he got his first pair of glasses. It's become an important holiday, and one that I feel bad about missing, especially when it is a milestone year! Often the celebration includes my mother baking a cake and putting an old pair of my dad's glasses on top of the cake (after cleaning them thoroughly!) and his employees presenting him with gag gifts and cards. This year I am in Iceland and my parents are in Arizona, but I thought of him on his special day and made him a little something. Happy Glasses Day, Mike Sevig! May your celebration be a spectacle for your spectacles!
Have you or anyone you know made up a holiday to celebrate every year? If not, why don't you? It is never too late to start a new tradition, no matter how strange a tradition it might be!
It's that time again, when I've made a pattern to suit a contest theme. I really enjoy the challenge of it, and since I already had a pattern of napping kitties, I decided to modify it to fit the "Cubist Cats" theme. I dressed the cat up in some Picasso style stripes and beret, added some colorful paintbrushes and palettes, and even got the shirt a little messy in the process. The result? I think it's a pretty cute cubist cat pattern. I think it would make an excellent artist's smock, and it would be a fun material for a craft kit of some kind. Well, I'll let you know when voting opens, and if you like my design, please vote for me! Thanks!
For those of you familiar with the show, I probably don't need to explain that I am a big Parks & Recreation fan. For those of you who aren't familiar with the show, the main character in the show, Leslie Knope, creates a holiday the day before Valentine's Day called Galentine's Day. It is a day for ladies to celebrate ladies. I had some fun the past couple days coming up with these Galentine's Day card designs, and I'm giving them to you for free (Creative Commons license information below). Ladies, let's celebrate the ladies in our lives; the poetic, noble land-mermaids that support us through thick and thin! Click on the links below the images to download printable versions! :)
Here is a printable Leslie Knope Galentine's Day card for you!
Here are some printable Waffle Cards for you!
Here are some Waffle Cards that say Happy Galentine's Day on them. :)
So, Ladies! Print and sign and give some love to your lady friends this Friday. And maybe have some waffles, too.
Cheers!
Kirsten
