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! 

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. 

My latest concertina book is the prime example of achieving a satisfying outcome despite of having little or no inspiration. I started with the vintage safety match box - found on the net - because of the sunflower. The writing and painting tools followed. And in the end I added the calendar where I filled in everyday temperature, measured promptly at noon. The whole book forms a unity because of the color yellow. The more wintertime approaches, the more I feel the urge to use warm color schemes because it makes me forget cold and mist and rain and the early dark of winter's evening.

Two pages in my sketchbook. I have been re-working a stamps collection and chose for a limited color palette of 3 colors: orange, blue and light blue. I'm inspired by existing stamps but don't copy them. Some details are left out, certain fonts are adjusted and, anyhow, colors are customized. For orange and blue I used fine microns, light blue is executed in colored pencil. 

This space control toy in bright turquoise blue dates back to ca. 1950. I'm planning making many more drawings of old toys because  of a sense of nostalgia.  No one better than Bill Bryson to describe the spirit of time of the 50's and 60's:
"I knew how to relax in an armchair in more than one hundred positions and on the floor in approximately seventy-five more. I knew what the world looked like when viewed through a jelly-o lens. I knew how things tasted, pencil ferrules, coins and buttons ..."
This passage comes from "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid", a book from 2006, describing Bill's youth growing up during the 1950s.  Highly recommended! For this drawing I used some Posca's and I refined the details with colored pencils.

I'm always inspired by nature, by plants and trees. And I keep coming back to the poems of Emily Dickinson because she was also a lover of nature. Sometimes when reading one of her poems, in my mind, I immediately see  what the following finished page in my sketchbook will look like. This illustration was done in one day, couldn't stop drawing. It's not always going smoothly like this though, sometimes I start a project, only terminating it after a long time.
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Twice lavender. On the right side an embroidered piece from maybe twenty years ago. I used to be an embroidery teacher and this lavender in a pot was a design I made for my students to recreate. I came across it while searching on my PC and made this drawing yesterday.

I have been teaching embroidery for over 30 years. One of the techniques in the curriculum was Blackwork. And, after so many years, this inspired me to fill two whole journals with drawn patterns. I started at the beginning of the Covid period and am now nearly at the end of my second book. I can recommend it to everyone: I think it is the best way to slowing down and relax! And it really is amazing how many different patterns you can come up with, just starting with a line, a dot, a square, rectangle or lozenge.