Hylpen

This is a drawing I did as a gift for my parents. This month they celebrate their 35th wedding anniversary! It is a picture of the old city Hindeloopen, one of the eleven cities of the Dutch province Friesland.

This piece was done with brown bistre ink, I am having a lot of fun with this material. I used different washes of ink to create the difference in tone, mixing the ink with water to create lighter tones. To get those sheep I had to carefully tape of the areas where I wanted the sheep, using a scalpel to cut the tape in the desired shape (those sheep in my previous post were setches for this drawing), after inking the background with a brush I removed the tape to fill in the details of the sheep. I used brushes for the main shapes and background tones, and then used dip pens to fill in the details.

This piece is prety big (44 x 19 cm) and the ink has caused the paper to curl a little. Because of this it was hard for me to make good scan. I'll post another pic when I have it framed.

Vacances en France

And again more than a week between posts, and again I had skipped town. I spend the last week in France, far, far away from modern things like internet, television or even cell-phone signal.

The drawing above is a sketch of the house where I stayed, together with a good friend of mine,. The house is owned by his parents, I did this sketch as a gift to thank them for letting us use this place. It was great, the weather in Amsterdam wasn't too great when we left but in France we had sunshine almost the entire week!

After the hectic graduation year it felt good to take a break from everything, I got some good rest and feel ready for the next step. I did some more sketches that I will shre with you later this week, I wanted to upload this one now though, since I'll be giving it away tonight.

Ink and color pencil on light grey sketch paper.