An entry for the Everyday Matters Challenge #34. Autumnal equinox. I think I like Fall the best. It’s a bit gray and rainy, but it always feels cozy. I know that time moves in constant speed everyday, but somehow it feels like it moves faster in Fall. Probably it has something to do with the fact that the days are shorter. So it is now already the end of September. October is coming this weekend. Before I know it, it’s time again to plan a Thanksgiving dinner in Amsterdam (note: I don’t cook the dinner, but someone else. I just plan, arrange, etc). Then Sinterklaas and his Zwarte piet will be hailed here from Madrid (or was it Turkey? I can’t seem to get this fact right). Time for chocolate letters, yum yum I love dark chocolate letters. It’s amazing that letters such as Q, X, and Z are never sold out. Eating chocolate letters is a good way to wait for Christmas to arrive. After that it will be New Year again and I am so certain that by that time, time will move slower again….at least that’s how I will feel.
A super quick sketch I did in the train this afternoon. Notice that the perspective is off; the size of the seats is not right (front seat should be higher not the other way around)
We watched a program on the Animal Planet this afternoon on “The Most Extreme, Killer Cats”. Here they list the best hunter and most extreme killer among all the cat family/Felidae in the world. We were so curious about which cat would be on top of the list:
#4 is Cougar/mountain lion in North America
#3 is Jaguar in the Amazon
#2 is Leopard in Africa, a very sleek, beautiful and agile animal
#1 is….DOMESTIC CAT.
We couldn’t believe it and we laughed so hard at this. You can imagine why…we have 8 most extreme killers in our house! Ok, statistically it might be right. Domestic cats kill the most (mostly small animals including insects). Their population is the highest in the world among the Felidae. If it is counted that way, well yes they are the most extreme. We just couldn’t stop smiling at the ‘fact’. We feel that we now have to walk really quitely around the house, just in case, you know.
We saw this person yesterday morning. He was just another passenger in the tram. Part of his face was hidden behind the tram’s seat. But the part of his face that was visible interested me to draw him. I had to do it quick. He looked a bit sad or possibly just a bit tired. Or it could be that he just has heavy lidded eyes. In general, his feature radiated or said something like, ‘I am a wise guy’. May be that was the thing that attracted me to draw him in the first place. I don’t know.
This car was parked on the street near a metro stop. While waiting for the metro to arrive, I thought to better use my time by drawing something. That something was this car. I started drawing the side closest to me, and suddenly the metro showed up. It was unfortunate, but I tried to finish the drawing while sitting in the metro. I think, I got the perspective and the length of the car not quite right. It looks a bit squashed; the nose is too short. It looked a bit bland without any colors, so I decided to add some colors at home. The colors sort of make up for the wrong perspective and length, I think. Now it looks rather cute…
Autumn is coming! The air is fresher and getting colder. The trees are loosing their leaves. Stores are starting to sell fall decorative pieces, made of natural materials such as leaves, flowers, nuts, etc. They are very pretty. I’d love to draw them but that means I might have to buy them then throw them away. I don’t think that that’s such a good idea. Therefore I bought a few mags that can last all autumn, to use as resources for practicing sketching some autumn products that I can’t just easily pick up on the side walks or parks.
Oh, that eaten apple is obviously not an autumn item. It was something that I drew in the metro. Someone was apparently too lazy to throw it away in a garbage can and just left it on the metro’s floor. Quite disgusting, but it was quite interesting too draw.
Click to enlarge.
This is an entry for Everyday Matters Challenge #31, a collection. I don’t think that cats can be categorized as a collection, but other things that I “collect” fit other challenges better e.g. books. I really don’t have a unique collection in my house. So I thought, well, I have 8 cats and they are all precious to me…so why not?
What you see is a drawing of 6 out of my 8 cats. The other 2 did not fit on the page of my sketchbook, so I stopped at #6. I did this sketch this afternoon, and as you can see, they were all sleeping in various position. Hey, it now fits the edm challenge better! A collection of cat sleeping positions sketch!
A little about my cats…Gurami and Salami are our very first cats. They are sisters and when we got them we came up with names based on food. We were (and still are) so obsessed with food. Our 1st to 6th cats are regular house cats; they are all females and have names based on food. The 7th and 8th are with pedigree; they are males (not quite anymore) and their names are based on liquor.
1. Gurami - a type of Indonesian fish
2. Salami - the popular Italian sausage
3. Wasabi - the green Japanese horseradish sauce
4. Liekamki (nick: red) - popular brand of Chinese sauces Lee Kum Kee. We changed the spelling for fun and it’s easier for the Vet.
5. Koolrabi (nick: kool) - a type of Dutch root vegetable.
6. Pirojzki - a type sausage bread from Russia/Eastern Europe
7. Bacardi (a ragdoll) - rum
8. Joseph Guy (a maine coon, nick: joey) - cognac
Pirozjki was sitting in front of the window. Something outside caught her interest. It was a chance for me to quickly sketch her for the first time. I found back my two Venetian glass pens last weekend. Since then I had the urge to use it. So I thought that tonight was perfect for that. I used india ink (waterproof) and colored it with grey and black ecoline (waterbased ink). I am quite happy with the result of this quick sketch.
NOTE: Click to enlarge.
Following the drawing that I made for a farewell card, there was a small farewell party. It was on Thursday night, after office hours. We went to a chinese restaurant (favorite of the person for whom we were throwing the party) on Warmoesstraat and had a set menu. It was ok, but I don’t think the food can be considered as authentic. It was more of international chinese food. The street was packed with tourists and strange people that night. We saw a naked man passed by at one moment, and a while later a man with a flower pot on his head walked by. He wasn’t holding the pot at all, and it was well balanced on his head. Bravo for him. Although he was clearly under influenced.
At the end of the party, the owner of this tiny restaurant gave each of the female guests a long stem pink rose. We were surprised, didn’t know where they came from. It was beautiful and it smelled so lovely. Well, unfortunately, my rose didn’t survive the trip home. It broke when I tried to get in my car. I was quite unhandy with it and completely forgot about the length.
NOTE: Click to enlarge.
This is something I made this morning as a part of a farewell card. I drew one good thing (thanksgiving turkey with Jack Daniels) and one bad thing (fingers got jambed in between doors resulting in light concussion and hospital stay) for the receiver to look back at in the future. I thought that it turned out pretty well, considering that I didn’t spend too much time on it. It became some kind of a (manual) charette, when the color printer decided to quit working yesterday.
I was planning to go and do some drawings yesterday and today. But somehow I ended up in a wrestling match with my blog and the blogger template. I’d been wanting a new simpler template for quite sometime and yesterday I decided to do just that. Well…what I thought was a simple thing turned to be the complete opposite. In 2 days I’ve learned more HTML, PHP, and CSS stuffs than I wanted to. In the end I still had to almost manually do everything despite the claim from some resources that it can be done this way or that way. Since I did it in what I think the simplest direct way, I am pretty sure that this blog page source is quite primitive to some experts out there. But hey, when I looked for some help on the W3C website, I couldn’t find any. That’s because their website bores me to death and is very difficult to read for a non-geek reader. It was frustrating. Luckily, despite all the difficulties, I still managed to get it done my way and in a look that I like. After that I still needed to do some chores, which means that I couldn’t do any sketching. But…the cleaning gave great reward. I found my old Europe Study sketchbooks and journals. Looking back at my first drawings brought back wonderful memories. I have scanned several pencil sketches and I plan to do so with the inked journal entries.
The following sketches are only a selection of pencil sketches done in may/june/july 1996. They are in chronological order, starting with my very first pencil sketch of the Europe trip.
NOTE: Click to enlarge.
This is the first pencil sketch that I made on that trip. It is of Rue de Alexander in Versailles, France. The sketch was made on May 31, 1996. You can see that the lines are still very dark and there is almost no contrast or focus. |
Chateau de Chambord, France in early June 1996. My professor helped me a bit with styling, contrast, and finding a focal point. |
Petit Trianon’s Hamlet in Versailles, France. Sketch was made on June 14, 1996. |
I am not sure where I made this. This seems to be out of sequence. It could be that I drew this as an exercise based on a pencil drawing technique book and following their examples. Sketch was made sometime in June 1996. |
A church in Barcelona, Spain. Sometime in July 1996. |
The Duomo, Florence, Italy. July 1996. |
Somewhere in Rome. Sometime in July 1996. This is the last pencil sketch in my sketchbook for the Europe trip 1996. |
Yes. This is one of the few times I can post a journal entry on the same day as I made it.
Today I am in a touchy feely kind of mood. And because I know that it gets even more annoying. So my sensitivity level is doubled. Anything anyone says made me think like as if there is another meaning behind it. Oh, did she/he mean it? Is that honest? I am so suspicious of everything. (But that is generally how I feel for the last few months. I also feel like I am walking on eggshells..crack..crakk..crakkk..I wish it gone but it won’t) Then today when I was going home something tripled my annoyance. When I was going home, I felt thirsty. I had to catch the train, but I thought I had just enough time to grab a drink. So I went to AH TO GO to get a bottle of Coca Cola Lime. There was a line in front of the cashiers but I gambled anyway that it would be quick. Well it was so unfortunate that when my turn to pay came up, the cashier went to help his colleague beside him. I mumbled about having to catch a train, he only replied ‘one moment’ without even looking. I looked at my watch for the third time, turned around and put back the bottle and ran out to the platform. He saw me running and called out, “Sorry. I can’t do anything about it”. I looked at him angrily and just proceed with running out of the store. I felt like sticking out my middle finger at him, eventhough I understand that he was being helpful to his colleague’s client (another customer of the store). But I just hate to be the victim of slow service.
I felt like drawing this type of entries again. Threw everything that made a long impression in my memory on that day onto a page without too much thinking. I told my self not too worry (too much) about how it would look, if the colors would work etc etc. Stop thinking, start scribbling. And I enjoyed it very much.
I decided that today is a good day to catch up with several challenges from the Everyday Matters Group. So here are my entries for challenge #25 (a drinking glass), #26 (vegetables), and #30 (a chair).
I went to the Main Library of Utrecht yesterday. I needed to return a few books that I have borrowed for 3-4 months and to pay for them. I also borrowed 2 new books on watercolor technique (by John Lidzey) and drawing. I was so lucky that I did this, because I found out that the employee who has accepted the books I returned and my payment actually forgot to update the library financial database. At the moment I wanted to borrow the 2 books on the other side of the building, the same man was working at the check out counter. And he was about to charge me the amount of money I paid earlier again. The funny part was I didn’t remember him and he clearly didn’t remember me, and we both “talked” to each other an hour earlier. Talking about good memory! He kept asking me about to whom I gave the money. I could only say “I can’t remember, I honestly can’t remember, it was a guy”. Uhm how much money did you give him? One ten-euro bill. Hmm.. I seem to remember that I gave 4 euros change earlier to someone …hmmm that must have been me then…. I am sorry…I can’t remember either…Uhm no big deal, no problemo…(smile politely).
I left quietly and went to the floor below to get some coffee. I like the fact that the library has a coffee bar inside the building and allow people to drink coffee/thee while reading magazines, newspaper, or surfing the internet. Only on this special section where the coffee bar is located. So after buying a cup of coffee I picked a table, sat down and started drawing this. When I was nearly finished with the ink drawing, Nor called me on my mobile. While we were talking about the kitchen tiles (we need some more for our kitchen), a lady who was clearly an employee, stopped by my table and talked to me in a dissaproved tone (with me still on the phone) saying that I needed to get out because mobile phones and having a telephone conversation are forbidden inside the library. Well, thanks Nor! That was the first time I got kicked out of a place. I gulped down the last bit of coffee, went outside to call Nor back to thank him and to further discuss the kitchen tiles.
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