50 shades of blue

For Bootcamp we were asked to make a grid with 50 shades of blue:

I thought it would be fun to make it into a pattern and gave this woman a 
'50 shades of blue dress'.  (to be honest it were 60 shades)
Well, what do you think: a new trend for the summer?

editorial illustration: breathe in, breathe out

Remember I drew lots of faces two weeks ago?
It was a preparation for the 'big' assignment for Bootcamp

We were asked to make an illustration for a magazine about meditation. The article was called: How to meditate, a primer for people who don't like to meditate. Find it here

It was a nice and very recognizible article,  so I had a lot of fun making this illustration. 
I would love to make more for this editorial market.

For those who are interested: you can purchase it as a high quality giclee print
in my etsy shop

In memori-mam, thinking of you...

Today it's exactly 4 years ago my mom passed away...

I made this selfportrait. In my hands I hold  the geranium I took with me after she past away.I wrote a blogpost about it last year  We now have about 30 geraniums.

My Mom lived in a village near Rotterdam, in the house where I was raised. There are living other people now, but somehow I still have the idea she's sitting there in her special chair and I can go and visit...I wish I could...

Each year I make a special blogpost to honour her.

The first year  I posted this one: to honour my mom
(including some animations my mother made)

The second year I wrote another blogpost about her: far away, but still near 

Last year I wrote about her geranium  and today I am thinking of her and give the geraniums some extra attention...

 

Blooms of Nigeria - Flower for Margret

Blooms of Nigeria  is a project set up by Rebecca Bradley and Janna Morton to draw attention to the abducted Nigerian School Girls and make the issue more visible.

I made this flower for Margret. She's one of the abducted girls.

The Blooms of Nigeria website will be filled with tribute illustrations commissioned for each of the 180 kidnapped Nigerian girls whose names are currently available to the public. Nearly 300 young women are still missing. A summary of what has happened can be found here. Let's hope to get this flower garden out into the world. 

If you wanna help, please share this post. The more people know about this issue,
the better! Thanks in advance!!

Opening exhibition 'Like' in Gallery Oker

Last Sunday I was at the opening of the exhibition in Gallery Oker in Amsterdam.
where a selection of my work is shown in a group exhibition.
Below you can see some of my works exhibited:

It was a nice surprise to see one of my paintings in the display window of the gallery: 'In de gloria',  mixed media painting on paper. I made this quite a while ago:

I also met the other exhibitants in real, which was very nice. I only knew them from Facebook: Kordula Röckenhaus, Helen van Vliet and Jacqueline van Leeuwenstein. Nice to see our work matches very well!

On the photo below a sculpture of Jacqueline on the left
and on the right some work of  Helen:

It was also good to meet some people from my illustration e-course I did recently.Very nice to see the faces behind the names and to talk about our experiences.

I didn't have the chance to make much photographs, my friend made some too, but it's always difficult  on an Opening Event. So I'm happy I can show you some...

On this exhibition you will find a mixture of new and older work.
These are also two of my older paintings, mixed media on paper.
On the left: 'one day I'll fly away' and on the right 'mixed feelings':

You can still visit the exhibition till the 6th of July. If you are interested, find more information here

 

Faces, people and vintage dolls

After part A of the e-course Make Art That Sells. with Lilla Rogers, 
I continued with Bootcamp I'm happy, because it's fun too :-))

Once a month we get an assignment, In the first week we get what Lilla calls the 'Mini': Draw a subject just for fun in various techniques. And guess what? The subject was faces, people and vintage dolls! Here are some watercolor faces:

I couldn't help it to make LOTS of faces After a year of drawing them in my face a day project,  I still LOVE it :-)

First I started  to search some images of vintage dolls.Also a fun subject to draw. I made these five below with a pencil and colored them in photoshop. It looks like a little gang to me: The gang of 5!

Then I began to concentrate more on faces only and made a lot of these collage faces, using vintage paper and little pieces of old paintings. I glue them together with my favorite ModPodge glue, which I recently bought.

For this one below I first I made some doodles on a piece of paper. When I scanned them, I suddenly saw the possibility of adding some stylistic bodies. So it became a group of people. The only one I have moved is the one on the left. But for the rest the story was already there.

I made some more faces with markers, also a technique I like. You can't be very subtile with these. The lines become thick and you can't really control it. Especially when they are a bit older and don't work that well anymore...

I could go on and on with this. But today we will get the big assignment.
So this will be continued...

Europe: 12 points

Yesterday there was the Annual Eurovision Song Contest.
This year we have a very special winner:

Conchita Wurst is a Singer from Austria. In normal life it's a man, but on stage he performs as the bearded lady. She wants to make a statement to the world: it doesn't matter if you are man, woman, gay or straight, just be who you are. Let's live in peace together...

I'm very happy she won with this statement. it's promising. Yay for Europe! You can listen to her song here. It gave me goose pimpels. Also fun to tell the Netherlands were second.

exhibition in gallery Oker

Sunday the 11th of May is the opening of a new exhibition in Gallery Oker in Amsterdam.
Four artists / illustrators will exhibit their work. And I am happy to be one of them!

At the moment I'm selecting work for this exhibition. Here are a few of them. 

The title of the exhibition 'like' is inspired on the fact we all 'met ' each other on Facebook. A nice way to connect..The other exhibitors are Kordula Röckenhaus, Helen van Vliet and Jacqueline van Leeuwenstein. Here are the poster and the invitation:

You are very welcome to visit the exhibition. The opening is on the 11th of May (I will be there too) The work will be shown till the 6th of July. It's in the center of Amsterdam, so if you are in the neighbourhood...

Rocking Rooster zipper pouch

I almost can't  believe it! This is the last assignment of the e-course Make Art That Sells. with Lilla Rogers. Time flies when you are having fun :-)

This week was all about the gift market. A huge market including all kinds of gifts: zipper pouches,  buttons, dolls, magnets, notebooks, puzzles, i-phone cases etc etc. So a fun market! Here is my design for a zipper pouch. Rocking Rooster.What do you think of it?

As always the week started with a mini assignment. We were asked to make photographs and /or drawings of things we collect.

I gathered some dolls and puppets I have. I wasn't aware this was a collection, but when I had put them all together it looked like one.

I posted the photo in our facebook group. And the rooster was immediately popular. I like him a lot too. He can sit on a shelf and bend his legs. After this week I love him even more :-)

Another collection I found were my musical instruments. They are still left from the time I was a  theater performer. I used to play the accordion and I had quite a few of them, but now I have only these two left.

I thought this could be a fun theme for an illustration: a rooster and music. One of my classmates said, when she saw my doll collection: "your rooster rocks!". I thought this could be  a fun title of my work: Rocking Rooster! I love alliteration :-)

I began drawing some musical instruments and roosters. Here are some drawings I made of the Rocking Rooster. Does he rock or does he rock? ;-)

In the meantime we got our assignment. It should be a hyper lush zipper pouch. Full with ornaments, icons, attributes and lots of stuff. Not so easy to get that organized.

I'm more a 'less is more' person. So this was quite a challenge. I played with various triangle shapes, different roosters and also other birds. But it was too messy.
Here you can see some work in progress:

After many hours of puzzling I came to my final design. Maybe it wasn't that 'lushy' as we were asked to do, but for me it was 'lushy' enough. This assignment helped me to work on the integration of the fore- and background. A very interesting point which I want to develop more.

After that I had to make the illustration fit onto a zipper pouch. How to present your work is also part of the assignment. I drew a zipper pouch and added a red background. Quite daring for me. I like it, but I think the product isn't very clear like this. I changed it and put it on a paper background. (see the first image of this post)

I had fun to fit the Rocking Rooster also on a i-phone case. What do you think?

Now we have come to the end of a fantastic course! Full with inspiration and information. Lilla Rogers is a great, inspiring and very positive teacherI  It was good to 'meet' so many talented and supportive people. I'm really enthusiatic and have learned a lot. But I'm also aware that I need and want to learn SO much more.

Because of that I decided to continue! I signed up for what they called 'Bootcamp'. We only get one assignment per month, so it's much more relaxed. And I'm gonna digest what I've learned so far. So I'm very happy to say again: will be continued.... :-))))