Blue Carolina

Blue Carolina
cropped
original 33x41cm
Oil on canvas

Finally on vacation for the holidays and I stayed up until 3 in the morning last night to paint this piece, took me about 5 hours. This is my friend Carolina whom I used to practice portrait painting that I haven’t done too much. I like it a lot and would love to do it more. I find it interesting to go into the facial features. You have to be so careful because one stroke can change the whole face and it might not look like the same person anymore, or the expression might change completely. The following pictures shows the painting process, starting off with a pencil sketch.

Fall dreamings

Fall dreamings
46x55 cm
oil on canvas

I´m finally back with a new oilpainting! I was sick almost all of september, couldn´t even eat for 12 days straight, it was awful. Went to the doctor so many times I stopped counting. So it took a while to gain back my strenghts, getting back to work and finally finding my way back to the painting.

Today is a beautiful fall day and I´ve been wanting to capture the fall feeling in a painting for a while now. So I´ve been taking lots of pictures of trees changing colors thinking about painting them. But instead I ended up using an old canvas that I had scrathched on with charcoal when I was only 2 years old. That made me start painting more freely instead of using any photograph as a reference. Used the color combination of indian yellow, sap green and alzarin crimson, sometimes blending them and sometimes using them more on their own.

I was trying to paint less controlled, letting brush strokes stay more often instead of working over them too much. I used my old charcoal lines as branches for trees. Funny thing to be "continuing" on something I did such a long time ago and don´t even remember drawing!

I´m putting up the whole series of photos I took of the painting in progress. I think the sky and trees still need some more work but I´m really happy with the light and shadows of the trees on the ground and with the bushes in the foreground.

New job and recent paintings

Oil on canvas, 3st 10x10x4 cm

This week has been full of new impressions and changes since I just started my new job this monday as an intern at an architecture office. I got to start one week early since they had so much to do there, and that worked out fine for me.

After we came home from Gotland I had been practicing some new techniques with my aquarelles that I brought, and I´m starting to like it more and more. But I can never really keep away from painting in oil for too long, so here are some new ones I´ve been painting on recently.

I added color on the three landscape pieces (above) last week and I´m really happy with the result in color! I did it over and over a few times to get the color I wanted. It turned out to be a mix of Paynes Grey, Yellow Ochre and Burnt Ochre, in various proportions. The sky is Payne´s Grey (my new favorite blue color!) and white, with the reddish under painting showing through.

Oil on canvas, 40x40 cm

Here is another recent one. I was experimenting with the light and the texture of the field. Colors used are Indigo, Payne´s Grey and Burnt Umber in the sky. And in the field: Indian Red, Burnt Umber and Indigo.

Trying to get back to drawing

Since last week I decided that it was time to start drawing again. I have been painting so much that I thought I shouldn't forget about drawing. And also because I really want to apply for an architecture scholarship that I found out about, where you have to send in pieces of your work (only black and white!).

Then hopefully I can do a field trip around Europe next summer with the purpouse of learning more about building houses in an enviromentally friendly way. That is something I unfortunately haven't paid much attention to in my three years in architecture school. And it's surprisingly not really a big matter in the education so you sort of have to specialize in that yourself. So I thought it was about time for me to put some focus on a really important topic like that.

I began drawing without a real purpose, to take some pressure away and get the process started. Did these sketches of my livingroom just for fun. And even though the apartment was kind of cluttered at the moment, it was fun because there were just more objects to draw! Makes it more interesting with all the details, like a random still life. And imagine a photograph of the same thing, that would not say anything at all, just that I have a messy apartment.


But I couldn't keep myself from painting for long, I found this really inspireing article about underpainting and the wipe-out method on the blog of Jennifer Phillips. And then I was boosted with creativity for the rest of the day to paint and wipe out rolling landscapes with only one "color". Just playing around with the shapes, compositions and especially the lights and darks, I was really enjoying myself. (Obviously influenced by Jennifers works.) Couldn't really get the best underpainting mixture so I ended up mixing all the "earth tones" on my palette to use them up. So now it kind of looks like I was painting in chocolate, but I like it. Will be interesting to see if I dare put some paint on top of this. Oh and also, I painted on this 3d-canvas for the first time so I made the landscape go around the edges too, in case you see it from the sides.

Three 10x10x4 cm - oil on canvas

Also I took out an old moleskin book full of my drawings from Portugal to inspire me to draw again. We went there first year of school in 2006. Our teachers gave us all a book and said as a joke that we had to fill them. But me and a friend were up for the challenge and really pushed ourselves to fill every page. And it looks really nice when you pull out the pages like an accordion and look at the drawings all together. Unfortunately I can't find this type of moleskin book anywhere, so I hope they didn't stop making it.



Going off to the island of Gotland now for a week, will hopefully come home with more drawings and photos of reference for painting!

Hibiscus experiment

Just a little hibiscus painting I made as an experiment with transfering an image with the grid method. Using the picture of a flower on my hibiscus tree. (It´s only 15x15 cm.) I did this picture in a few stages. Since I started out with a canvas that I had painted on before, it already had a darker background. And when painting the lines of the flower I did it with white paint to get the lights, so I kind of got a black and white underpainting. Then I put it away and let it dry for a month or so. Today I took it up again and started filling in the hues (Madder Lake Deep, Burnt Sienna) and the darks. Then I went into detail with the darks and lights, making it less flat and giving it more volume.

After that I painted over everything around the flower with a dark sepia paint and with the paint still wet I mixed in white and indigo to get some texture and light in the background as well. Now I hope this will dry in time for my grandmothers 80th birthday!

Here are some pictures of the process:

Memories from Louisiana

This is another painting I did the other the day. It was inspired by my last trip to New Orleans over new years to visit my boyfriend when he still lived over there. And when going so far south I´m always looking at the nature, the swamps and vegetation, the way the trees grow so differently than over here. But the one thing that I love the most: the Spanish Moss! It has a way of creating a certain atmosphere. Almost as if someone had decorated the trees with them.

One day we made a trip to a plantation house called Destrehan Plantation and it turned out to be the rainiest day with lots of thunder so we didn´t really go inside. Instead we took lots of pictures in the surrounding areas when the rain had stopped. I ended up finding a simple little wooden house with a gloomy yellow light shining over the panels of the wall, so I just had to take pictures of it. Since my camera isn´t all that good the pictures turned out dark and strange, but I just knew I had to keep them for future reference. So I´m thinking that I want to paint more of the spanish moss and Louisiana nature. We are going back in november so I´m really excited about gathering more material for painting!

Yesterday me and a friend went out on a little painting trip to Tyresta National Park, south of Stockholm. Since I haven´t really got all the gear to go plein-air painting with my oils I bought a new moleskin watercolor book and brought my aquarelles. It was such a strange feeling to paint in watercolors again! I´m so used to oil by now. But it was really good practice too, the way you have to be so sure of every brush stroke and how you can´t change anything afterwards.
I´m thinking that there are new things and techniques I can bring from oils to watercolors, and yet other things I can bring from watercolors to oils.
Didn´t really paint anything I feel like posting here though since I feel like I´m just getting started with that again. And my scanner is buried to deep under stuff anyways.

That´s all for now!

Indian Summer Sky

So this will be my very first blogpost here. I intend this to be the place where I first put up my new oilpaintings and other art before it shows up on my website. The website is in needs of a serious update since it mostly consists of drawings and watercolors from my late teenage years. So until then you will see it here.

Since last summer I´ve taken up the oilpainting again and I have been painting all summer as well as doing some renovating of the apartment. Still have a month left before I start my job as an intern at an architecture office here in Stockholm. It will be very exciting to see what the real work life is like and hopefully I will still be able to do some painting on the side!

This is my latest piece that I finished yesterday. I was inspired by the dryness and heat of the late months of summer, crickets singing in the sunburnt fields. At the moment I call it "Indian Summer Sky" after the colors used.

Indian Red
Indian Yellow
Greenish Umber
Raw Umber
Ivory Black
Titanium White

The paint isn´t really dry yet so when taking pictures there are a few strange reflections, so I will have to update the photo later!