How inspiring our garden is this time of the year! At the center of the picture below, you can see the Aralia elata, a multi-stemmed tree with its beautiful autumn discoloration and, in my view,  an indispensable tree for any garden. The white flowers  bloom  in late summer with large panicles and are quite showy and very attractive to bees. These flowers are followed by clusters of small black berries that ripen from late summer into fall and are quite attractive to birds. 

I started a small concertinabook with all of the gardening tasks I should carry out this autumn and maybe winter. Fingers crossed that it doesn't keep raining as it has recently. The garden is very argillaceous and therefore not fun to walk through! 

Cet été j'ai eu la chance d' animer un atelier dans un de mes régions préférées de la France, le Provence. Le petit village nommé Lurs était un rêve de paix en pleine nature provençale et, pour cela, très inspirant. 

Et oui, tous ces livres accordeon sont le travail de mes excellents étudiants. J'espère qu'ils ont autant appris de moi que moi j'ai  appris  d'eux! Chaque jour était un délice même avec la chaleur intense. Un très grand merci à cette compagnie internationale:  Jean-Luc, Suzanne, Françoise, Sylvie, Francisco, Aurélie, Philippe, Francesca et Sylvie, et une sincère reconnaissance à Philippe et Cristine pour la parfaite organisation du stage! 

From 16th till 20th of September I have been instructing a workshop in Seoul.  The students all made their own accordeon book and they did a wonderful job! As always I have been inspired by students' works and learned a lot from working with them.  
Thank you so much Hee Yong and Sujie for your wonderful coordination!  
And thank you students Lee Soo Hyun, Park Joo Min, Kim Min Jeong, Lee Su Jung, Yoo Ji An, Min Byeong Hwa, Son You Hak, Kim Miok, Han Hee, Jun Mi Jeong, Na Seung Hee, Jo Sungyoung, Hewon Juhng, Yoo Do Yeon, Kim Eun Jung, Lee Choon Ki, Park Kyung Hwa, Chung Kyung Ae, Park Hee Kyung and Moon Ye Jin!

After the workshop there was plenty of time to explore an ultramodern town combined with old temples and palaces and masses of colorful people. We visited the nearby neighborhood of Insadong with its small streets full of modern galeries, wooden teahouses, craft shops, boutiques and restaurants

We also went to the mountains that surround Seoul and climbed a peak of 375 m in the company of Joon, Cecilia and her husband. Thank you for taking us there. We were exhausted, not being used to mountainous landscapes, but so grateful for that experience. 

The last few days, I 've been very busy drawing houses. This will be my next concertina book so I still need to add a few more. All the houses are from the Netherlands, in their typical architectural style. Maybe I will make some more books with houses from other countries. Anyone have an idea which countries that  could be? Suggestions are welcome!

I love everything vintage, especially the 1950s style. This drawing makes me think of a book I read a few years ago: 'The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid"  by one of my favorite authors, Bill Bryson. In this memoir he re-creates the life of his family and his native city in the 1950s. For this drawing I used my Posca pens and colored pencils. 

Something I wanted to do since a long time: customizing my phone case. It's a nice DIY thing and I will paint another one as an extra! I used Posca markers and sprayed a protective layer of acrylic matt varnish. HAPPY with the result!
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This is a big piece I made back in 2016. Since then, I have sold many small prints of it, apparently a lot of people are in love with this drawing. Last week I had a great idea to make this design into one of my concertina books. Of course, the lay-out had to be adapted because the big design is square and my concertina books are oblong: 75 cm/14 cm. For those who are interested in hearing how I proceeded, read the entire working process below. 

I already have a nice scan of the first drawing of the square piece. I use my new photo editor Affinity to cut and paste all the elements, rearranging everything. Since the lettering is too big for the much smaller book, I rewrite it onto another piece of paper, knowing that the block has to fit in the middle part of the book. After that, I also scan this and then it's playtime,  puzzling can start! 
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Once I'm happy with the lay-out, I start drawing lines for the writing on the concertina book, using my fine pigment liner. I'm doing this first thing because there's always the risk of making mistakes! After that, I print the whole book - in parts - on regular printing paper, put them on the light box and transfer the nibs in pencil, then filling everything with the black pigment liners. It takes a lot of patience because of all the tiny letters but that's no problem, it calms me down! 

A few years ago, I made this spread in my big Moleskin sketchbook. These are all excerpts from a wonderful diary that my maternal grandfather left us. I picked some fragments to write down about him going to America with his family when he was only 17, but also about his experiences  during WW I when he  just returned from there. 

Now I'm working on a new concertina book about this America adventure, rearranging the fragments into another size of paper and leaving out the war-section. I added a small family tree for better understanding.

 At the end of last year, for several weeks, I used an app on my phone to record bird songs. I was quite curious about how many different birds would come to our garden or fly over? Every day, early in the morning, I put my phone on the windowsill for about 15 minutes and I must say, I was rather surprised about the result: 34 different species until now. We are not so very far from a few nature preserves and the birds are not all coming into the garden but still! This was a good starting point for a new concertina book and ... I learned a lot about birds, their names and how they look!

We love to play board games and regularly organize game evenings with the children or with friends. These two games below are very old and are part of our cultural heritage. And since I love everything that is  legacy of our ancestors, I made this concertina book with  illustrations and some background. I used gouache in order to obtain an opaque color but the two french knitting dolls are worked in watercolor.