textile dreams – fibery wake up

This page is intended to document my various attempts at drawing and painting. While this is primarily is a needlework blog, my aim is to design as many of my projects as possible myself. I figured out a while ago that improving my non-existing drawing skills might be what it takes to get a lot of my ideas out of my head onto a piece of paper and finally into a needlework piece. By now, I have almost a whole sketchbook full of pencil drawings, but I recently got bored and splurged on some watercolours and watersoluble oil pastels. Since then my enthusiasm for drawing and painting has soared considerably. As time goes on, I’ll add my pictures here. To save some space, I’ll use thumbnails on the page, if you’re interested enough to look at the full size version, as always you can click on the thumbnail.

November 21, 2009:

The 25th Sketchcrawl led us into the relative warmth of the Völkerkundemuseum:

We started in the islamic section, where I found a pretty blue hexagonal tile:

a heavily ornamented wooden spoon:

Oceania had some very nice and colourful pottery:

A wooden model of a boat, also from Oceania:

One of my favourites of the day was in the North America section:

and my last one of the day:

September 19, 2009:

For the 24th Sketchcrawl, we went to the Botanical Garden, so lots of plants to see and draw.

Those bold red berries were irresistible.

One leaf of a Gunnera plant.

The greenhouse was overwhelming. Here are a few cacti from the loads that were on display.

Not only the flowers are pretty, leaves come in loads of different forms and colours as well.

August 22 to 27, 2009:

Another visit to London. Not that many sketches, but every little bit gives me some much needed practice.

At a Lake in Regent’s Park

August 19 to 22, 2009:

Birmingham turned out to be quite a surprise. I really liked the city and even managed to do a few sketches:

Chinese Quarter

At the Birmingham Canal

August 9, 2009:

August 8, 2009:

An all-day concert with lots of downtime for me in our beautiful old town hall gave me quite a bit of time to get some drawing in:

I especially like the decoration in there:

August 1, 2009:

The first sketches in my new and shiny sketchbook! The paper is slightly rough and supposed to be able to withstand light watercolour washes, so I should be all set.

I had very little time for this one, so I sketched the motif using the watersoluble oil pastels and fleshed it out using watercolours at home.

On my way home I came upon those nice flowers at the center of a flowerbed in a park. Pencil and watersoluble oil pastels.

July 29, 2009:

The day was way too nice to stay stuck in the office, so I found myself a nice shady vantage point to try out to use my watercolours in the wild.

July 25, 2009:

The weather was lousy, so I found a motif right here in my study.

July 24, 2009:

My first watercolour. The idea of transparent colours had not quite gotten through to my brain.