I found an old paperback on my book shelf an AKAI Jazz and rock discography from the 1980′s and could not resists to use it a sketchbook for quick landscape notes. The drawing is made with a Pentel ink brush pen, a tool that I can highly commend.

One of the projects I had planned to work on this year is to experiment with ink drawings combined with oil and oil thinned oil colors as I use them in my monotype prints. Inspired by the works of Hanns Schimansky and another artist (I lost the link,but it is somewhere on this blog)who does [...]

Taking a short tour around the Abbey Maulbronn takes not much more than an hour with plenty of time to sketch and take photographs. Spring, Autumn and Winter are the best seasons as to light and colors for a visit to Maulbronn. The view on the quiet lake is beautiful at around 17.30 -18.00 h [...]

Unfortunately I can’t remember where and how I found this film and the portfolio of the artist Alice Shirley.  The artist does amazing ink drawings.

As long as there is no wind I still like to go out to sketch. I found a fairly dry place underneath the layers of beech foliage and decided to make notes of the forests grid of tree trunks. As I neglected the foliage this image looks like winter. I buy ink in bigger bottles [...]

The forest surprises and inspires me each time I go out. Usually before I do anything with my sketchbook in the woods I sit down to make some notes about what is around to see,smell and hear. That helps to make the “connection” to nature, to relax and to get ready for sketching. Today I [...]

There are some books one has to have. The tree of codes by Jonathan Safran Foer is one of those for me. Cover graphics and title got my attention immediately. There can be some sort of magic in books, especially in art and artists books, they can spark off ideas or close missing connections. Visual [...]

The show in Paris must have been great. I wish I had been able to see it. The website of DRAWING NOW is a bit odd to navigate: you need to go to the list of galleries and then open each gallery feature to see works. There are many different styles to see from representational [...]

Temperatures get chilly these days. After a longer pause I continued to draw in the apple tree orchard. It took some time to pick up the thread again and to find my way through the many labyrinth of wrinkles, plateaus and valleys that the apple tree in front had build in many years of growth. [...]

I spent the last sitting with drawing the bark of the big trunk in the foreground until a wind shock blew my little ink vessel across the sheet. The ink went onto my right arm and into the sleeve of my jacket. And that was it for the day. I forgot to fix the pages [...]