Tuesday 23rd- Wednesday 24th August

23rd August. Fatbursparken- just around the corner, I went there to sit outside with my cup of tea and ended up staying and drawing. Oh well. The blue lumps are part of a fountain that seems to spend most of its time dry- as you can see from the people walking around in it!

24th August. The new Karolinska hospital - well, it will be in a few years! This building site is the reason (indirectly) that I'm in Stockholm, so here it is. I actually rather enjoyed drawing this - and (yes, I know engineers will laugh...) but as a 'layman' you don't realise just how much things move around on a building site until you stop and try to draw them. So it was interesting and a good challenge.

Saturday 20th- Monday 22nd August

Saturday 20th August (As before, click on the images to enlarge them and read the text)

Sunday 21st August

Monday 22nd August

Friday 19th August

Friday 19th August. Ingmarsö- one of the islands in the Stockholm archipelago. If you click on the images you should be able to read the writing.

Monday 15th- Thursday 18th August

Monday 15th August. A new sort-of series of drawings in ink in an old book I found in a charity shop. It's a collection of Strindberg's plays, which is quite appropriate for drawings of Stockholm, and it has beautifully smooth paper. Not very thick, so I can only draw on one side of the paper and only really with a particular pen, but it works and it will be very satisfying when it's full (one day...)

Tuesday 16th August

Wednesday 17th August

Thursday 18th August

Saturday 13th- Sunday14th August

Saturday 13th August. Hagaparken, a big wooded park to the north of Stockholm, which in parts feels remarkably like an English park. To be fair, it does have a section landscaped to be like an English stately home park, but apart from that, there is deciduous woodland and not very much rock! A very pleasant place to sit on a hot Saturday afternoon. (Click on the image to see it larger)

Sunday 14th August. Skogskyrkogården- the Woodland Cemetery, to the south of Stockholm. Nick and the engineers went on a tour, and I had a  peaceful hour and a half's drawing session. This is the Elm Grove, a shady (and windy) grove of trees on its own little hill which gives a clear view out over the rest of the cemetery.

An extra from the Woodland Cemetery, trying out watercolour shapes with drawing over the top.

Saturday 6th- Friday 12th August

Saturday 6th August. Inside James Turrell's Skyspace, at Ytterjärna. A very quick sketch, lying down on the curved bench inside and looking up at the sky. But it gives an idea of what it was like, I think.

Sunday 7th August. Also at Ytterjärna, this was while sheltering in Bruno Lilljefors' painting hut looking out over the lake during a raging thunderstorm! He was a famous Swedish painter (and hunter) of animals and birds and his reed thatched hut, which has a glass front, is preserved in the grounds of the centre where the James Turrell exhibition is.

Tuesday 9th August

Wednesday 10th August. Sergels Torg from Kulturhuset- inside the music library.

Thursday 11th August. I love the fact that this building- formerly the offices of the tax department- is called 'the' skyscraper. Now it's been turned into student accommodation but has a rather swanky bar on the top floor where you can go and look out over the city while slowly sipping your precious drink.

Friday 12th August. Barnacle geese in Djurgården. Working on doing larger drawings from quick sketches.

Tuesday 2nd - Friday 5th August

Tuesday 2nd August. I sat in the garden of this old wooden church to do some drawing. It's in the middle of a square of old buildings, surrounded by trees and flowers, like some sort of secret garden.

Wednesday 3rd August

  

 

Thursday 4th August

Friday 5th August. Maria Kyrke churchyard- church gardens a bit of a theme at the moment.

27th July- 1st August

28th July. Drawing while waiting to move into the new flat (helping to get rid of the stress of packing!)

Friday 29th July

Saturday 30th July

Sunday 31st July. A colourful rowan tree on Djurgården- already looking autumnal- agh!

Monday 1st August. View from our new window...

Sunday 24th - Tuesday 26th July

Tuesday 26th July. A quick sketch on the way home from the National Museum, looking back to where I'd come from.

Monday 25th July. Mariatorget, a pleasant leafy park/ square. New coloured pencils bought specifically for the colours of Stockholm buldings!

Sunday 24th July. The view from the top of Stadshuset tower- the one that is on all the postcards! You get a 30 minute 'window' to climb up there, take it all in and come down again, so I didn't spend very long on this. And it was unbelivably windy up there.

Saturday 23rd July- World Wide Sketchcrawl No 32

Saturday 23rd July. Stockholm is on holiday so it was a solitary sketchcrawl this time! But time spent out sketching can't be bad. This is at Stadshuset- Stockholm City Hall (incidentally where they hold the Nobel Prize banquets, for all the prizes except Peace, which is given out in Oslo).

 The rest of my sketches from the day are up on flickr at:

  http://www.flickr.com/photos/citysketching/

The Sketchcrawl site, if you want to see what people all over the world did on the same day, is:  http://www.sketchcrawl.com and the results are posted in the forum section. Look under 32nd World Wide Sketchcrawl and at individual 'results' posts.

Monday 18th - Friday 22nd July

Friday 22nd. Drawing listening to music as a way to get started in the morning- this was a couple of tracks from Here's the Tender Coming by The Unthanks.

Thursday 21st July. Too rainy for sketching outside, so I went to Biologiska Museet, an amazing old-fashioned museum which has a series of dioramas with stuffed animals and painted backgrounds, showing pretty much every creature great or small you could ever see in Sweden!

Brown bear and elk from Biologiska Museet.

Wednesday 20th. Högalidsgatan, just round the corner from the old flat. Experimenting with an exciting new pen!

Tuesday 19th July. Sergels Torg, a busy roundabout in the centre of town. Overlooked by the very nice cafe in Kulturhuset, where I was sitting to draw this. More on that another time...

Monday 18th July. First day back after 10 days back in England- and the realisation that we are moving in less than two weeks.