Cat Asleep In Bidet - A Study

My cat Furryosa loves to sleep in the bidet on her bright orange cover. She fills the space perfectly. So it obviously needed to be immortalized in my Hobonichi.

Days 14 and 15 of the #29faces challenge

I have been running slightly late and changing my style a bit and experimenting. Faces really are a challenge for me, especially when trying to do realistic faces. Still, it's great practice and enables me to find what works and what doesn't. Here are the faces of the past 2 days:

Hobonichi Postings - Sept 2nd and 3rd

I am going to resume doing one drawing a day on my Hobonichi. Unfortunately, I probably picked the wrong month to start with as September has got the #29faceschallenge and October has Inktober... Still, if I don't do it now, I will never do it! Plus it makes me see whether I really need to get a new Hobonichi for next year to continue drawing every day or not.

I drew my first face for the 29 Faces Challenge on the September 1st page so no reposting this one. Instead, here is Sept. 2nd and Sept. 3rd.

#29faceschallenge - Day 1

The 29 Faces Challenge is back! It runs all through September and you need to draw or paint one face a day (or less if you are not able to) all through the month.

I was caught a bit off-guard and I realised the challenge had started only when Day 1 was almost over, so I quickly grabbed my Hobonichi and a brush and just did a quick sketch.

Here is a link with all the details for the challenge: http://29faces.blogspot.de/p/september-2016.html

Catching up on the #29faces challenge!

I am way behind on updating the blog and I am missing days 20 to 22, so here they are:

Day 20:

Day 21:

Day 22:

Days 18 and 19: #29faces challenge

Here are my offerings for days 18 and 19 of the #29faces challenge:

Spontaneous fountain pen drawing

Gimp and Inkscape collaboration

Days 10 and 11 - #29faces challenge

I'm a little bit late to post so here is day 10:

I doodled this one evening and I didn't use a safety net any pencil first, which is highly unusual for me.

And on to day 11:

Back to my old stomping grounds with this sketch of Sailor Moon. I discovered the series when I was already going to the university and at the time, it was not so cool to reveal that you were still watching cartoons at the ripe old age of 20. So I watched it in secret but now that it has become cool, I can proudly come out of the anime closet and say, I watch Sailor Moon and I like it!

Happy Year of the Monkey!

Happy Chinese New Year to all those who celebrate!

I am following a really cool account on Instagram called Ouchii World (@ouchiiworld) and they have made the cutest sketch of a monkey. I decided to doodle it in my Hobonichi Cousin on today's page and here is what it looks like:

I really love the bold lines and simple colours that they used. Unfortunately, I didn't have any beige marker so I used yellow instead.

You can check out the original monkey here.

Hobonichi Challenge - Catching Up

I believe I haven't posted the last few sketches I did for the Hobonichi Challenge, so here they are:

My last drink

Cherry tomato (faceless fruit scares me!)

Button

Days 7 and 8 - #29faces challenge

Here is my offering for Day 7:

This is a portrait of John Constantine from the Hellblazer series. It was bound to happen as I like this character a lot. This was not the picture I had originally intended to draw but my muse decided otherwise and this was the picture I ended up with. If I remember correctly, it's the latest incarnation of Constantine that is being shown in the new comic series of Constantine. I wasn't too fond of his hair so I just skipped it!... I really like how rough his face still looks like.

Day 8:

This was something I doodled while watching TV with no clear idea of where I was going. I had started with Harry Potter and the others came along.

When I was spending my semester abroad at the University of Wolverhampton, England, I met plenty of people and since I'm not that good with remembering faces, I decided to draw a cheat sheet for myself that I carried along. In it, I would draw each person I met with their name and nationality (there were many nationalities and I also needed to differentiate the Germans from the Austrians) and their characteristic that made them unique. It really helped me a lot and it looked a lot like the Harry Potter drawing I did above.

#29faces challenge - Days 5 & 6

It seems I have forgotten to post the last few #29faces challenge pictures for the past couple of days so here they are:

Day 5:

In case you didn't guess who this is, it is Neil Degrasse Tyson. I have only recently been made aware of how awesome he is and I thought he would make an excellent subject for the challenge. I used markers mainly with 2 different shades of grey and black.

Day 6:

This is a sketch of one of my favourite comic book characters called Nemi by Norwegian artist Lise Myhre. You can follow her on her Facebook page.

29 Faces Challenge - Day 4

My take on Lisbeth Salander from the Millenium series by Stieg Larsson. I based myself on the look given to Rooney Mara because it was so extreme and simply because I wanted to draw a mohawk.

I really liked the book series although I got lost somewhere in book 3. I also watched both the Swedish movies as well as the American remake. While I tend to be against remakes of classical movies, I have to say that I liked this particular remake. One thing I was looking forward to when they announced that they were making a new (American) movie (after the extreme disgust I felt when I heard the news) was to see how they were going to interpret Lisbeth. She is such a strong and unique character and I was afraid that they would glamourise her too much but they kept her as understated as she was in the books and this is probably the reason why I liked the movie.

Hobonichi Challenge - Day 3

Hobonichi Challenge

I discovered today that there is another challenge running this month other than the #29faces challenge. It is the Hobonichi challenge. Just like most art challenges, it consists in doing one drawing per day. The twist is that it needs to be done in a Hobonichi journal. I own both the A6 and the A5 journals. I use the A6 for daily planning and the A5 for journalling so I decided to attempt to do the challenge on the A5. I also would like to just use the fountain pen to do the drawings just to practice that technique.

Here is the drawing that I did for today:

2015 Hobonichi

This past year, I challenged myself to do a sketch or a painting everyday and in order to track my progress I have chosen to do so on a Hobonichi planner. I wasn't quite sure that the super thin pages would cope but they did and they did so beautifully well.

This year, I have decided to not do this particular challenge but instead, I will take part in any monthly art challenge that I can find. In February, I am going to take part in the #29faces challenge that consists in drawing/painting/sketching one face per day. This is going to be even more of a challenge for me since I'm not that good at drawing (human) faces. I'm really hoping to learn from this and to improve my skills.

For now, here are quite a few pictures of the best sketches I did in my Hobonichi this past year.

You can get your very own Hobonichi here!

Chewy

I have the biggest crush on Chewy so I had to do something about it...

Decorating my Nerdmaids

Since I have received my two Nerdmaids, I have been using them a lot. Well, I have been using mostly the light one and I have added the Hobonichi Cousin for 2016 to Nerdmaid Dark and I'm waiting for January 1st to start using it on a daily basis.

I use my regular Nerdmaid for journaling mainly and I'm applying the One Book July challenge for the month of November. Since I'm doing more writing than sketching, I need to always have one pen at hand at all times. Until today, I had simply placed the pen inside the book and closed the TN with the elastic band and it was working although denting the inside pages a bit.

So today I went stationery shopping and I bought some self-adhesive pen loops by Leuchtturm. I had used them once for my dark brown TN by Morgan LeFae's Trinkets and it was working well.

I used some scrapbook paper that I placed behind the notebooks and where I attached the pen loop.

Back of the scrapbook page

So I went scrapbook paper hunting and after looking at many shops, I finally found some beach themed paper among all the Christmas paper. I also found some pen loops in different shades of blue (there were at least 3 different shades that I saw in the shop!) and I went to work. Here is the result:

And a last family photo for the road!

¡Que calor!

It is seriously hot at the moment. It's barely breathable...

Here's a scan of my journal for the past 2 days. I use a Hobonichi diary and I completely love it! I had discovered it all last year and I could see how it was used by everyone who had one and I had to have one of my own. Before getting it, I thought it was just a simple day-to-a-page planner but it is much more than that... It has a monthly diary on top of the daily diary. The most interesting thing about it for me is the paper they used: Tomoe River paper. It is extremely thin paper but that can withstand the use of fountain pens without bleeding at the back of the page. I am completely in love with it and I use it as my daily journal. I have made it my mission to draw at least once a day and I always do my daily drawing in my Hobonichi.

For more info, here are a few links of interest:

- Facebook page
- Official shop