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| 21st December: Liz Porter |
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| 21st December: hyacinths brought by visitors on Sunday. Another really lovely swedish thing- bringing flowers when you go to someone's house. Now the flat smells amazing when you walk in the door. |
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| 20th December: ha! He's not looking down (much) in this one... |
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| 16th December: new tool- water soluble graphite pencil. Very cool! |
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| 17th December: another of the occasional 'oops I'm about to go to sleep and I haven't done a drawing yet' series... |
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| 18th December: just before our mince pies and mulled wine party. |
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| 19th December: not from life! Skogsrå, the fairytale maiden with a hollow bark back. |
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| 14th December: oh, another kitchen sink sketch. |
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| 15th December: self portrait sketch |
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| 7th December |
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| 8th December: practising for winter by drawing (outside) wearing mittens |
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| 9th December: we went to watch the bandy- a bit like ice hockey, but played on a bigger, outdoor rink with more players and a ball instead of a puck. It was sleeting and felt quite cold- though not as cold as when we went last winter and it was minus 10C! |
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| 10th December: as the caption says, drawing (while hungry) to make the food cook faster... If only that were true. |
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| 12th December continuing the occasional series in an old copy of Strindberg plays. Thick black ink shows up best and gives the most satisfying effect. 11th December has gone AWOL. After almost a year of doing a drawing a day it's become quite rare that I manage to completely forget to do at least one. But on this occasion I seem to have managed it- I can't find it anywhere and have no recollection at all of doing a drawing that day. |
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| 13th December: the view from Kulturhuset again- from a different one of its many floors this time. Lucia Day in Sweden- everywhere I went in Stockholm there were groups of people dressed in white robes and singing- usually very beautifully in multi-part harmony- and groups of teenagers who had obviously just finished but were wandering along humming to themselves and occasionally breaking out into song. Apparently under the old (Julian) calendar, 13th December was the shortest day of the year, so it made sense to have a festival celebrating light on that day. |
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| 2nd December: the star lights that are everywhere... |
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| 3rd December: continuing the light series. Is this becoming an obsession? |
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| 4th December |
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| 5th December: a non-stop 10 minute practice |
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| 6th December: looking down the middle of Kulturhuset- it's quite a tall building! I wouldn't have thought I'd enjoy drawing an escalator, but there's always a first time... |
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| A mini-series of quick tone-only light sketches: 27th and 29th November, 1st December |
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| Monday 28th November: more lifedrawing... |
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| Wednesday 30th November: a new one- portrait painting. I don't remember the last time I tried to paint a portrait, so it's good practice anyway. |
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| Thursday 1st December: sketching the lights out of the library window. The unidentified 'structure' is a big piece of, well, sculpture I suppose, in the middle of the roundabout at Sergels Torg in central Stockholm. It looks a bit odd and grey during the day, but it comes into its own when it's lit up- and shines from the inside- in the dark. |
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| Monday 21st November: krokis (lifedrawing) at Tellus Bio |
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| Tuesday 22nd November: two versions of the same cafe scene- my two favourite styles at the moment. |
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| Tuesday 22nd November... as before! |
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| Wednesday 23rd November: journal page. Christmas trees are springing up everywhere! |
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| Thursday 24th November |
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| Friday and Saturday 25th and 26th November: cooking nuts on Friday night.The beginning of the weekend's food extravaganza! Unfortunately Saturday's sketch is not really representative of the astonishing quantity and quality of food we were treated to as a Thanksgiving treat- (thanks to an American friend not going home then...) but there was too much going on and for once I actually didn't feel like sketching. The star lights are everywhere now- either lamps like this one or hanging from special sockets installed in the ceiling, and nobody in Stockholm has curtains so it's beautiful when you walk down the street in the dark and see them all. |
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| 16th November: imagination drawings |
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| Journal page from 17th November |
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| 18th November |
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| 19th November, extract from journal page |
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| 20th November |
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| 14th November: we went to watch an ice hockey match at Globen- a big arena to the south of Stockholm (which does indeed look rather like a globe). |
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| 14th November |
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| 14th November again: as you can see, we were sitting pretty high up. But that meant you could see what was going on over the whole thing, which was useful. |
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| 15th November: inside a rather nice cafe- and the man who came to talk to us, who said he had been a boxer in his youth. |
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| 10th November: experimenting with tonal drawing, which gets rubbed back, then line drawing on top. It doesn't show up all that clearly on here, though. |
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| 11th November: another experiment- taking the weather into account and drawing- very quickly- with a chunky clutch pencil and woolly mittens. Somehow I think this is going to be a useful technique in the months to come... Plus I have a new rule, which is that if I have an idea like this I have to try it out straight away, and in at least three drawings... rather than ending up with a long list of things-I-might-try-one-day-but-never-quite-get-around-to. |
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| 12th November |
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| 13th November: at Sjöhistoriska Museet- ie the swedish National Maritime Museum. All sorts of excitment there- inlcuding carved wooden figureheads and lots of incredibly intricate models of ships. |
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| 8th November: the house we lived in between- roughly- the mid 80s and the mid 90s. From memory... maybe I should go onto streetview and do another one, but it was really interesting to do it this way, and I was quite surprised by the amount of detail I remembered. |
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| 9th November: making cocoa and going for a walk. |
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| 5th November: All Saints Day here in Sweden. Cemeteries everywhere filled with candles as people remember the dead. We missed Bonfire Night in England, this provided a somewhat calmer alternative. |
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| 6th November: Mozart's Requiem at Maria Magdalena Kyrka. |
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| 7th November: drawing papier mâché figures I've been making. |
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| 1st November: I'd been on a baking mission... |
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| 2nd November: building sites are becoming a bit of an obsession, apparently.This one is a floating building site. When I arrived, I noticed the helicopter on the platform, with a big group of people standing around it. After a while it flew off- which is why it appears twice (yes, I know- it's meant to be like that!) |
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| 3rd November: quick pen and watercolour sketches from the same hill as yesterday's drawing, though a bit further along. Monteliusvägen, if you're interested! |
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| 3rd November: as before... |
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| 4th November: drawing from the same place for the third day in a row... looking down at some rather brave elder, clinging to the cliffs. |
