I Give You The Sketch – The Last 31 Days

December 1, 2016 Annette12 Comments

Hello December!

Good morning Summer!

Who knew that when I decided hundreds and hundreds and HUNDREDS of days ago that I wanted to draw every day in 2016, that I’d actually do it? Not me, that’s for sure.

Yesterday was day 335 of my #IGYTsketch adventure, and with 31 sketches left to create, I’m pleased as punch (why not Judy?) that I’ve continued to put pen or brush to paper for 11 months straight. Well, almost… I have missed days, and played catch up – which is silly, because actually there are no creativity police out there!

The point is, I’ve kept going, not because I have to, but because creating has become part of my life. It makes me happy, relaxes and challenges me and puts me in touch with something bigger than myself. Art opens me up.

I have had great ideas that I couldn’t quite pull off, and drawn more leaves than you could poke a stick at in a deciduous wood. I’ve drawn by the beach, at work, at home, in bed, in cafes, anywhere I’ve found myself.

It’s all very Jack Dawson a la Titanic – I have air in my lungs, a pencil, a scrap of paper and now I’m here with you fine folks!

Let’s take a little screenshot trip down memory lane, shall we? I posted all my sketches on Instagram, using the natty hashie #IGYTsketch, which I modified to include the month.

To kick the year off, I sketched along with one of my now favourite artists and illustrators, Lisa Congdon.

Lisa taught a month long class online through CreativeBug, and it was a great way to find my feet with the daily habit of creating. Love, love, loved watching her videos and seeing how my brain and hand translated what she drew.

I think the absolute BEST thing about drawing 335 pictures (so far) and posting them online this year has been the way that’s connected me with other artists. I have met so many sensationally talented, lovely people through creating, it’s really helped me feel like part of something bigger, even though I’ve spent most of this year at home by myself.

I bang on about people’s generosity and kindness a lot on this blog – I know – but it’s because that’s my experience of life online and off. Whether I’m writing or sharing art, people are overwhelmingly kind and encouraging. That’s RAD.

Thank you so much people of the interweb. I have needed you this year and you’ve been here for me.

I hope I’ve returned the kindnesses I’ve received, in some small way.

Let’s continue our screenshot tour through the past five months, shall we?

When I look through these snapshots of each month, I remember lots of the days I drew these things – flowers and abstracts, huts and shells and things from the IKEA catalogue, and SO many leaves, and I feel so damn grateful that I signed up for that little online creativity course Inspiration Information, I think back in July 2014.

I had NO IDEA where that one decision could lead me. No idea whatsoever. I believed wholeheartedly that I could not draw when I started that course. I was wrong!

Hmmm, seems to me that I need that reminder right now, and maybe you do too.

We don’t know what’s ahead of us. No matter how much we plan or make New Year’s resolutions or how secure we feel in the world, we just don’t know what’s next. And the limits we put on ourselves, sometimes they’re total bullshit.

That one decision, to sign up to a course that I think cost me $50, has altered my life. I was going to write, altered my creative life, but I don’t think it’s right to rope it off, to put one aspect of who I am over there, sectioned off from the other parts of me.

With 31 days left of 2016, I plan to keep giving you the sketch. I hope you’ll see something that makes you smile or triggers a memory or brightens your day.

I have made myself happy on crap days by picking up a pen and sketch book. I’ve looked up more than I ever have and seen more than I ever knew was around me, and within me this year, thanks to drawing and painting.

Not bad for a girl who spent 40+ years thinking she wasn’t artistic.

I wonder what you’re wrong about as far as your talents and capabilities. I know this, you’ll never know until you have a crack.

Got air in your lungs? Got a pencil and a scrap of paper?

You know what to do next.

As Jack said, make it count.

Much love to you,

Annette xx

Here’s my favourite sketch of the year, little me, drawn from one of my first memories.

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The IKEA Sketch Project

August 29, 2016 Annette8 Comments

Happy Monday, friends! Today I’d like to invite you to participate in the first ever (well, first that I know of) IKEA Sketch Project. The project is 100% endorsed by me, and IKEA have not paid me a single meatball, yet!

Before we dive in, let’s catch up a little.

Hello! Is the sun shining where you are? It is here, and it’s delightful. Spring is only days away, and that’s making me very happy. Buh-bye winter, it’s been real. I’ve basically stopped coughing up a lung, which pleases me mightily, and I’m wearing a fabulous plaid shirt today, so I’m feeling very snazzy!

How are you? Are you longing for spring? Or heading into fall? Do you have a shirt that makes you feel snazzy? I highly recommend it.

After catching up with the Kardashians this morning (Is Rob having all his tattoos removed? They look very faded.) I hot-footed it down to the library, where I nabbed my favourite spot in the quiet study area.

I’m sitting by a long, narrow window, so I can see sky and trees and grass, and hear not much except the clackity-clack of keyboards and the noise of the snack pack of the lady next to me, and an occasional cough. It’s heaven in my ‘hood.

Back to the invitation to this IKEA thingymajig; as I think you all know, I’m a teensy bit addicted to all things social media, sketching and Swedish furnishings.

You could say I’ve got a bad case of Triple S syndrome. In that respect, I’m totally anti-vax!

The much anticipated arrival of the new, shiny, ‘designed for you’ catalogue from my favourite Swedish retailer got me thinking that a great way to find inspiration for my my daily sketching practice, and work on drawing tricky stuff like chairs and tables would be to go all Julie/Julia Project on that glossy tome, and sketch something from the catalogue each day. Gosh that was a long sentence. Sorry grammar gods.

So I busted open my catalogue to page 245 on the weekend, and sketched myself an Applaro outdoor chair.

Whoops, technical WordPress hitch, I don’t know how to make the double dots appear over the a and o, sorry about that to any lovely Swedishian readers. I even forgot them over the A in my sketch, ay carumba! (That’s Swedish for yikes.)

I shared my sketch on Instagram, as is my daily habit (using #IGYTsketch), and my friend Emily from Squiggle and Swirl said she’d had a similar idea about sketching from the IKEA catalogue, and Claire from Cats Eat Dogs was on board faster than you could say Swedish meatballs.

We’ve decided to take an ad-hoc sharesy approach, and take turns choosing a page number to sketch.

Earth shattering announcement – the IKEA catalogue is not the same the world over! *picks self up off floor*

When I announced that I’d sketched a chair from page 245, and Claire flipped to page 245 in her St Louis, USA version of the catalog (eep! they lost some letters too), she found an entirely different page of products.

You can check Claire’s cool Instagram account, right here and Emily’s lyrical Instagram drawings can be found here.

Would you like to sketch along with us?

For those of you thinking, I can’t draw, you’re wrong! Everyone can draw, it’s a totally true fact!

Here’s what you need to know:

We’re all on Instagram, so we’ll be sharing our sketches there.

It’s as easy as sketch, snap and tag. We’re using #IKEAsketchproject.

For the moment, either Emily, Claire or I will choose a page number or maybe a specific item (I haven’t actually run any of this past them in an official, sign up and lay your money down kind of way, because it’s a fun thing, with NO silly rules or tut-tutting), and then whoever wants to can join in and sketch and share.

And if you just want to sketch anything that catches your eye in the catalogue, that’s okay too.

Fun, right?

You could even create an IKEA masterpiece from macaroni, or macrame. The sky’s the limit!

Let’s also say from the get-go that this is not at all a competitive thing, it’s a we love drawing and sharing thing, okay?

It’s very important to note there are no #IKEAsketchproject police, you can dip in and out as it pleases you, but how fun would it be to see lots of hand drawn Vardagen bowls and Garnera serving stands, not to mention slightly wonky, whimsical Lisabo side tables.

So, pens, markers, watercolours, macaroni, paper and IKEA catalogue/log at the ready?

Go!

This is your official invitation to join in, just for fun, because sometimes fun and silly and wonky is a fantastically effective antidote to having to be oh-so-exacting about things, don’t you think?

Creative play, that’s where it’s at.

Come on! Join the #IKEAsketchproject, we’ll even modify the catalogue’s sub-heading:

IKEA — Designed for you. Sketched by us!

I look forward to seeing your amazing, sweet, wonky, unbelievably stunning drawings on Instagram.

If you don’t follow me there already, you can find me here. Don’t forget to follow Claire and Emily too, they’re great!

I’m off to sketch page 175.

How do you reckon you pronounce Inbjudande??

Yours in the promotion of creative fun,

Annette xx

PS If anyone at IKEA notices this and wants to start a fabulous new range of sketched IKEA furnishings, call me!

My favourite human

July 8, 2015 Annette14 Comments

Isn’t it nice when you get to have a lovely day?

Today I arranged to get away from work early so I could hang with my favourite girl for the afternoon.

To the untrained eye, I was babysitting my niece, so my sister could do some stuff on her own, but really for Miss M and me, it was chance to hang out and have fun.

She’s getting so tall, she’s up to my chest already and shows no signs of slowing down. She’s funny and creative, cheeky and a little bit sneaky, traits I fully endorse.

Being with her makes me happy. It’s not what we do, it’s just being wth her that I like. I liked helping her pack a little bag of textas and paper so that she could draw while I devoured some lunch. I enjoyed walking to the coffee shop around the corner with her, and holding her arm before crossing the street. Playing a guessing game about her friends’ names.

Simple, happy stuff.

She zeroed in on the macarons in the coffee shop cabinet. We practically inhaled them. Yum!

Chatting easily.

Dancing.

Snakes and ladders. We had to make a die because it wasn’t in the box. I beat her fair and square!

Air hockey on the iPad.

Watching a movie together.

Emmet, you nailed it. Everything is awesome.

An MM original — “Person who is surfing on lots of fish.”

What I liked the most about today is that in just being together, she taught me something, and I taught her something.

She taught me that if I want my flowers to look real I should overlap the petals.

I taught her how to play Solitaire and how to draw a cube. It’s all about the three sticks, FYI.

A simple, lovely, heart filler-up of an afternoon.

How was your day?

Annette x

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I got schooled! 10/2015

March 15, 2015 Annette24 Comments

Yesterday I got schooled – and I loved it.

Allow me to explain.

The lovely Rachael, from my online creativity course gang, heard about a watercolour workshop being held on Tuesday evening, so she tagged me in a Facebook post.

It really grabbed my attention, and I quickly looked up the artist, Selina Braine. I couldn’t make it to the class, but I was intrigued, both by her painting style, and her obvious passion for teaching art beyond the walls of a classroom.

I saw that she offered private lessons and before you could say ‘dude, you can’t even draw’ I was emailing her with an enquiry.

Fast forward to Saturday, and I’m pulling up in her gorgeously tree-lined street, feeling a teensy bit nervous, but mostly excited.

As I come through her gate, Selina pops her head out of the front door, and I’m ushered in to her fab studio space where there’s art everywhere, books stacked waist high on one side of the room and my learning space awaits. I feel instantly welcome and like I’m in good hands.

I sit down, and before me there’s paper, brushes, and a gorgeous vignette of a polka dotted teapot, a bottle with baby’s breath exploding from its neck and a delectable looking red velvet cupcake nestling in front of the pot and bottle.

Selina’s website I Can Draw With Selina shows off the kind of artist she is. You can also find her on Instagram. Pop over and have a look, her work is utterly beautiful.

Like Maria Von Trapp teaching someone to sing, we started at the very beginning.

Colour manipulation with water. I could have painted pages and pages of slightly varying blobs of reds, greens, blues, purples, and I’m sure I will at some stage. And how rad are the egg shell tones? My kiddie palettes haven’t let me explore like this, so I’ll be upgrading my equipment pronto.

Selina had done a bit of research on me via my Instagram feed, which was why the lovely vignette on the desk included baked goods! So after we got warmed up with colours and curved lines, she asked me to do the thing I do not do – to draw.

Selina's notes. Image by Selina Braine. — Selina’s notes. Image by Selina Braine.

Gulp. I was in trouble now.

I decided to quiet my inner protestations and just try. What was the worst that could happen? My drawing would suck, and I might cry. Heck, I cried at work, in the stairwell, on the street and as I ordered coffee this week… I’m clearly not afraid of crying.

So I tried… and Jimminy Crickets, I did it!

I started with an outline in pencil, then I painted the base of the cupcake, then Selina whipped out her trusty hairdryer and dried what I’d done. I layered other colours, worried it was looking crap, but secretly was feeling super stoked that it wasn’t.

I added some pencil, erased some pencil, tweaked the colour mix on the icing, listened to Selina’s guidance and gentle encouragement… I was smiling a LOT by this stage of the lesson.

It’s kind of amazing how simple it actually was to draw that cupcake. I don’t even care about whether you (or I) think it’s a good drawing or a crap drawing, it’s a drawing that I did, then painted. Woo hoo!!!

I CAN DRAW.

If you’d asked me at 1.55pm, as I walked up to Selina’s house, ‘excuse me miss, can you draw?’ I would have answered resoundingly that aside from a fetching stick figure, I could not. Fast forward an hour, I’d changed my opinion of my abilities.

How rad is that?

Next challenge, the bottle with the baby’s breath (gosh, that apostrophe is worrying me, welcome to my brain) – big gulp. This was translucent and had branches and water and teensy tiny flowers…. I was worried about getting the shape of the bottle right. Thank you eraser inventor, thank you!

I had a crack.

The colours here make me so happy. I took a little creative licence and changed the cupcake colours. I think the yellowy orange is really happy next to the brown bottle.

Here’s a thing – I am not good at negative space.

Selina kept encouraging me to stop… oops sorry teach!

The two hour lesson flew by, yet felt completely unrushed. Selina was easy to chat to as we drew, painted and explored, and I’m really looking forward to another lesson next week.

I think the thing I liked most, aside from everything, was the ease Selina has in her teaching style. There was nothing intimidating or yes ma’am-ish about the way she taught me. Really, she just guided me to do what I didn’t know I could do, while simultaneously dispensing a lot of amazing tips, tricks and techniques that I didn’t have a clue about.

I can’t wait to go back and learn more next week.

We might try painting some buildings – eeek! That seems kind of ambitious, but it didn’t stop me from pulling over repeatedly on the way home to snap shots of interesting roof lines or buildings I passed.

I think Selina’s website is perhaps the most aptly named I’ve come across, because now I can draw with Selina!

Keep creating and playing, and don’t be afraid to get schooled.

Cheerfully,

Annette x

PS Don’t forget to pop over to my Instagram feed where you’ll find more #paintisaverb photos.

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I Give You The Verbs

Tag: drawing

I Give You The Sketch – The Last 31 Days

The IKEA Sketch Project

My favourite human

I got schooled! 10/2015