Play in Progress

I’ve been looking for a way to make my public transport drawings ‘exhibitable’, take them out o sketchbooks somehow, mostly by using folded single sheets of different sizes, like here. This is another attempt, not just putting the people on a single sheet, but trying to convey the feeling of looking through a whole sketchbook, while it still being a flat piece that I can hang on a wall and that could possibly be framed. It is 1,50 m long and about 24 cm high, and I really recommend that you click on it and look at the full resolution file, there is way more to see here than fits in a 620 px width!

I’m happy how this turned out, and I think it will have a good place hanging in a café. I hope somebody will look up sometime and get lost in my big little drawing, and then be surprised how late it already is…

Well, from me that is.

From time to time people contact me to ask how they can buy a drawing, or people that buy one tell me that it took them a while to figure out how to do it. Now, I don’t want to plaster ‘Buy me!’ messages all over my blog, but clearly if it is not obvious how to do so even to people who already made up their mind that they want to own one of my drawings, something is missing. So here comes the comprehensive guide to buying my stuff:

Most of the drawings you see here are for sale. Yes, even the sketchbooks (but they are pricey). If you see something you like you can simply contact me to find out if it is still available, and I am going to answer you with all the details. To get an idea: individual drawings cost between 100€ and 300€ (depending on size, with ~Din A 4 at 150€ and ~Din A 3 at 300€), and sketchbooks start at 900€ (depending on the size and number of pages and the kinds of sketches inside). I take great care to protect my drawings on their way, and in many cases I might be able to send them already matted. Shipping depends on size and destination, but it is free for smaller sized works inside the EU. Payment methods are Paypal or direct bank transfer (Überweisung).

Another, less personal option is to browse my Etsy store. There you will find drawings that I have already prepared for sale, most of them matted, and complete with full information on size, media, and shipping costs. On Etsy you pay via Paypal or credit card. (Here is a guide to the payment process.) (Here a similar guide written in German by a patron after finding out for himself.)

I also take commissions, can send you a drawing already matted and framed, and am willing to accept payment in several rates. However, such things depend on the specific situation, and I cannot give ‘rules of thumb’ for them yet. If you consider taking me up on one of them, please contact me directly. The same goes for studio visits.

Oh, and if you happen to be in or come through Berlin, starting from the 15 February you can of course also come to my exhibition and have a look at my drawings in person.

Example of a Commission

Just this week I finished a commission for a friend of mine who wanted a slightly larger version of one of my travel sketches—here some of the stages that led to the finished drawings (photo only, because it is too big for my scanner…)

Every day there are more roots sprouting, the old ones a bit longer already.

Hi, I have an upcoming exhibition that I need to tell you about: Drawings and watercolors at Kaufbar Berlin, the opening is 15 February, the exhibition itself continues until 2 April. I’m so excited! On view will be plant pictures, but also two large Berlin views and people on public transport. More details in the coming weeks.

On another note, today there’s a feature on Urban Sketchers Berlin on Berlin TV station RBB (7pm), among the sketchers yours truly. You can find details about the show here, and will be able to watch it for a while after on the website here.

Tulip, silverpoint over gouache and charcoal for the shadows.

I still feel compelled to test a new combination of media or a slightly different way to use them with almost every drawing I make of my plants. And they are so patient! Let me draw them again and again without ever getting bored of posing…

P.S. Also, I have an exhibition coming up at the Kaufbar Berlin. More details coming soon!

More views of the same old plants, more experiments with how to depict them.

I’m still looking into the relationship between color and line, but also between looseness and tight rendering. Drawing at home and having time made my drawings recently much more exact and detailed than they usually are, sometimes working in several sessions that need to dry for a while, as with some of the ink washes that depend on a complete outline in masking fluid. Sometimes I miss the speed of quicker, more fluid drawings, so I’ve been trying to do more of them as well, as you can see in some of the pencil drawings above. I’m looking a lot at the Helga pictures by Andrew Wyeth, especially the drawings and watercolors. One result is a slight curiosity about his drybrush technique (good for very detailed and exact renderings). I also realized that many of even his simplest pencil drawings are actually quite big, and have been experimenting with drawing bigger myself, also as a way to get back to speed and fluidity, to keep my lines moving. (nothing to show yet as they don’t fit the scanner and even during the day it is too dark to take good photographs).

I continue falling into plants—I can draw the same plant over and over again without getting bored. While doing one drawing a variation occurs to me making me want to start the next version as soon as the first is finished. Drawing many versions of similar things makes it easier to conduct my drawings like an experimental series testing different media, ways of mark making, and their combination. I feel unclear about my relationship to the elements of line, value and color, which to give how much weight, how to relate them to each other. Sarah Simblet wrote in one of her books that usually adding lines to a drawing started as a value drawing, or the other way around, does not work well, advice I’ve found to be helpful in many cases (some of the force of lines tends to be lost when filled in with shading, just as the haptic force of light/dark contrast tends to be broken up if too many linear details are added that ignore the light/dark organisation). I just seem lately to be unable to stick to one or the other, being fascinated by the tension between them. There is always something in a plant that I could not do justice to, and thus I try again.

Hint: If you click on one of the pictures it takes you to a bigger view – if you click on the bigger view, it takes you to the original file, which is about 3-4 x as big as the bigger view, and in many of the pictures necessary to be able to see the pencil lines.

India ink wash and details in pencil.

Coming soon: Experiments in silverpoint and water-soluble oil paint.

Classless@Eschloraque, gouache on prepared paper

I’ve been experimenting with ways to sketch in the dark, sketch in bars, clubs at parties etc. It is a very fundamental challenge – I only see big forms and cannot make out the specifics of facial features that I rely on in my subway sketches, plus I can usually not make out the tip of my pen or brush the way I can in daylight. In a way it is like drawing with glasses on, made of milk glass, or running with weights. I’m not actually satisfied with any of these attempts, but I think I might come to an interesting place if I manage to keep it up for a while. I find it hard to judge an experiment like this before I have tried it at least somewhere in the 40–80 sketches range, because it takes a lot of orienting and testing the ground to become comfortable enough to actually play with it and see how far it can go.

The only white I’ve found satisfying on the dark paper I prepared (because in the dark it is the lights that make out the forms more than the shadows) is a white Edding 751, but it dries very slowly and sticky and is just in general not a drawing tool that feels good to me. Not sure what to do about it, though.

Left & middle: Meridian Brothers @ Haus der Kulturen der Welt, white marker and white Derwent Drawing pencil on prepared paper, right: club night in gouache.

Spektrophon @ White Trash Fast Food, on the left in gouache, right in white marker.

When I went to meet the other Berlin urban sketchers to be recorded sketching for local TV I realized I had forgotten to take a sketchbook or paper (I don’t have a current sketchbook since I came home from Istanbul), so I used the backside of one of those as my impromptu leporello book.

Sketches during recordings made of urban sketchers Berlin for Berlin TV station RBB.

With the outside too cold for comfortable sketching tours I’m being sucked into the details of my seedlings. Originally I made them with the intention of putting them into pots as soon as they were ready, but then I found the complete view with roots that the jars afford me to be so fascinating that I put off putting them into earth. I think most of these are somewhere between six and ten months old. I just don’t get tired of drawing them. Plants provide such a rich diversity of forms and colors in very little space, like a perfect playground to test and experiment with different drawing techniques. If you look closely you can see that I’m still exploring different ways to combine lines and color or tone.

The rest of my travels through Scotland (1–8 August), or at least the bits when it was dry enough to draw outside. I hitchhiked to Oban and spent two nights in the luxury of an affordable private room, then took the ferry to the tiny island of Barra (you can see me having breakfast there by the sea in this post). Then on to Uist, the Isle of Skye, and some solidly wet days between the steep rough mountains and beautiful forrest of Glencoe. I also spent a day or two just drawing pots and cups to practice my ellipses inside when it just would not stop pouring, but they make for boring pages and don’t tell much about the places I stayed in, so I’ll spare you those.

I loved how drawing islands from a ship forced me to be quick, yet work in color anyway, as they make fairly abstract shapes and I’m too short sighted to make out much structural details, but there is so much action in the colors. On many of the islands there are no or only barely any trees, yet there is a wealth of colorful plants and mosses, often looking dramatically different depending on the movement of the clouds, the on/off of direkt sunlight etc.

Letter from the Hebrides

P.S. This letter is now up in my etsy store.

These are all from earlier this year – I was in such a frenzy of final exams, the Open Air Gallery and last minute travel preparations (is there another kind?) that although I did find the time to make these drawings, I never got around to photographing (they are matted and mostly too big for my scanner) and blogging them. Until now:

Dead Tulip I

Dead Tulip II

Painted Nettle

Oberbaumbrücke detail

Holteistrasse Ecke Boxhagener

Gärtnerstrasse

Westhafen

Most of them are quite a bit brighter than they look here (they are on white, not grey paper)—there doesn’t seem to be a time of day in November in when my apartment is bright enough for photographing artwork, and artificial light and photoshop games never seem to turn out right. The drawings vary in size – the flower drawings are almost miniatures, with the window of the mat measuring just 6 x 16 cm, while the windows for ‘Oberbaumbrücke’ and ‘Westhafen’ measure 30 x 40 cm. All of them are now up in my etsy store (70–200 € per drawing):
http://www.etsy.com/shop/OonaL.

Drawn Letter from Glasgow

When I arrived in Glasgow in the rain I rejoiced – the last days in Lisbon had had me hiding from the sun and heat around noon, and somehow being in a cold rainy place felt a bit like coming home. I bought a raincoat. Coming from the bonbon colors of Lisbon the dirt, ochre and sandstone red of Glasgow were soothing, too.

Sketchbook Spread 18

I wrote about the homely griminess of Britain:

I don’t remember any place outside Britain with such a high acceptance for beer related stickiness of tables. But I don’t mind, just as I don’t seem to mind the very trashiness of the hostel I’m staying in. I expect accommodation in Britain I can afford to be grimey. I even expect expensive accommodation to be grimey. I can’t remember ever having stayed in a place in Britain that would be considered ‘clean’ in Germany, and that goes back to visits with my parents and the student housing I lived in as a visiting student.

Spread 19

Glasgow seemed to be all ochre and sandstone red with a little bit of blue-gray for the roofs and some dark green for parks and gardens.

Spread 20: 'I didn't look at a watch or clock or asked anybody for the time today between 9:30 and 13:30'

Spread 21: 'Urban flora around the river Kelvin, growing out of concrete & walls'

Spread 22: '7 am on a saturday most of city still seems to be asleep. One door to a private park is open.'

The drawn letter from Glasgow is now available for sale in my etsy store (100€).

Looking at my travel drawings I get the impression that at least since July I’ve been exploring different ways to combine lines and colors, playing around with different drawing processes. This was without a doubt fueled by the workshop ‘Lining over Color’ I did with Richard Camara during the Urban Sketchers Symposium in Lisbon, although I feel that it goes back a bit further than that. You’ll see that the sketches in this posting differ wildly, too, in how they employ line versus color, although I drew them all within less than a week.