Copenhagen: Nyhavn

 

I made three drawings in Copenhagen, this was the last one. A beautiful old harbour with coloured houses, very pretty. But it was very very cold, my fingers where aching when I finished the ink work. I knew the watercolour wouldn't dry, it usually spoils the drawing. So I decided to colour it digitally at home. Done with Gimp.

Dungeons and dragons

My son plays Dungeons and dragons with a close group of friends. Buddies he still sees every friday evening, from his highschool days. He is the DND-master, that means he determines the story. They did a difficult quest, and just lost in the final battle. It happens. He asked me to make a drawing of his group (the Carnelians), and I came up with this. 

Ink drawing, scanned and filled with digital colouring. Really fun to do.

Spaubeek

I am fond of drawing with red ink Fude pens nowadays. Yesterday afternoon, in one of those ancient "hollow roads" I was able to make this quick sketch. I had forgotten to bring my watercoourset, so I decided to fill the colours digitally. Using Gimp.
 

Thull, on the hill

 

Thull, another one. The air was cold, the foundtain pen didn't run smoothly, but that worked okay I think.

Added some grey tones at home, digitally.

Quaira

  

The city of Quaira, in the Stellae desert. Ink drawing, digitally coloured.

Zara

Zara, our granddaughter, stayed here at our home for a day. What a joy. I made this pendrawing, which I coloured with digital means.

Loempia in Hoensbroek

Loempia's are the Dutch word for Vietnamese Spring rolls.

I saw this guy standing next to a little foodtruck on the main square in Hoensbroek. I did not have a sketchbook, just took a quick hazy picture and made this drawing at home.

Our garden

We had a few days with fantastic weather. I made this drawing on my new laptop with the program Sketchbook Pro. All digital.

A digital face

A first attempt for an all digital painting. No reference images, models, tracings or whatever, just drawing with a digital pen on my laptop, starting from scratch.

The Outlook

I can't go out to do some nice on location drawings, and I just don't feel like painting after pictures.
So I decided to try some digital painting. I wanted to try Procreate, but you'll need a Ipad for that. So I used Autodesk Sketchbook, to be used with my touchscreen laptop.
It is my first all-digital drawing, and it took a while to get used to the pen and brushes, and find out where all the features are hidden. Not a very easy program to use. But here it is, something weird.

The enigma of a monday at noon

I went to an exposition, the Tefaf in Maastricht. there were some Giorgio de Chirico paintings.
I was inspired by these, and made my own version.
Ink drawing, digitally coloured.

Terraforming

I haven't posted much drawings lately. I had a dip in inspiration and preferred reading books in the present warm spring weather under our walnut tree in the back garden.
A few days ago I started drawing an eye, (of the left astronaut) in ink. Slowly, and completely unplanned I made this ink drawing. The drawing evolved under my hands.
You can find it below. Then with Gimp I added colours and a background.
You can seethe result above. It's about astronauts making a remote planet into a habitable environment. No Aliens so far.

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Animated Kathagen

A last shot of the old year 2016.
I tried something new, making a little animation of the scene I sketched a few days ago.
I made this in Gimp. I made 11 little sketches on tracing paper, on top of the original sketch.
Eventually I used 6 of them. Furthermore I made 2 background colour scenes. All in all the Gif now consists of 18 pictures. Painstaking work, but I really liked making this.

Blue skies

Sometimes I have the privilege to make something extraordinary.
Our Tebodin office moved from Maastricht to Elsloo, in a far better and contemporary office building.
I did the interior design, and made a few round glass separation walls.
As the office lacked some colour, I designed this repetitive sky with a sketched local Limburg landscape, also with a hint to the work we do at our office.
I found the sky on Google images. But I still had to redesign 30% of the clouds, as they were not repetitive.
The sketch was made with fountain pen on a small  piece of paper, and resized 20 times or so.

It was printed on vinyl foil, and glued/pasted on the glass walls. When the sunlight is out, it shines through the foil, and the scene becomes very vivid.  


The size is 9 x 1,2 meters. The largest drawing I have made so far.....

Is there life on Mars

Experimenting with ink drawings and digital colouring. It started as a doodle during a boring lunchbreak.

Brightlands

It must seem like I don't make any usual sketches any more; I only feature different stuff like exhibitions, digital art, travels, paintings etcetera.
Here is another event: today my largest work of "art" was presented at the opening of our new Tebodin office on the "Brightlands" office park in Geleen.
A lot of dark suits, speeches and drinks, then the presentation, an explanation and putting my name under the digital painting.

The basic idea was a "Bokeh" image of the chemical plant at Chemelot (Geleen).
I once drove by the plant on a dark moonlit evening with some ground mist, and the lights on the towers seemed to shimmer like alien eyes. I tried to capture that feeling.

The colours are the exact firm colours (nowadays Tebodin is part of the international Bilfinger group). The work was totally made digitally, using GIMP; the dimensions of the print measured 2 x 4,5 meters. That's why the final image in TIFF (resolution 300dpi) measured as much as 1.5GB....

 

A tiny remark: I was there to present the image, and didn't carry a camera. That's why the pictures don't show public :)

Firestation

Some years ago I made a design for a station for the local firebrigade. It was never built.
As the station was located on the terrain of the coal mine "Emma" (now totally demolished and gone without a trace) I wanted to get the idea of burning coal or cokes across.
The basic idea was a massive black concrete block, with on the elevations the imprint of fossil ferns (in the old days we could find those everywhere on the mining hills).
And in the centre a round patio, with stained glass walls in red and yellow. Yes, like coal which is burning inside. A fitting image for a firestation.

I was doodling around yesterday and suddenly the image was there. I decided to use the drawing to experiment with digital colouring in GIMP. And here we are: the original sketch and the digital result.

The wedding of Peter and Julie

Last Friday my Belgian colleague Peter married with his fiancé, Julie.
As a surprise present I made this digital photoshop collage of them, pasted into a Bouquet book cover.

The Bouquet books are a series of cheap hyper-romantic novels.


I'll continue with USA drawings tomorrow.

Diomira

Diomira.

Leaving there and proceeding for three days towards the east, you reach Diomira, a city with sixty silver domes, bronze statues of all the gods, streets paved with lead, a crystal theatre, a golden cock that crows each morning on a tower. All these beauties will already be familiar to the visitor, who has seen them also in other cities. But the special quality of this city for the man who arrives thereon a September evening, when the days are growing shorter and the multicolored lamps are lighted all at once at the doors of the food stalls and from a terrace a woman’s voice cries ooh!, is that he feels envy towards those who now believe they have once before lived an evening identical to this and who think they were happy, that time.

(from Italo Calvino, "the invisible cities").

This drawing was made with ink, scanned in and then totally digitally painted using GIMP (open source Photoshop).

This way of digital painting was a first time for me, and it took a while to know how to handle the program and brushes. Still a long way to go.

Lost world

Doodling around and experimenting with photoshop: this drawing is 100% digital.