In my previous life I  was an embroiderer. I was particularly interested in folk art embroidery. Each country in the world has its own style, colors, patterns, materials ... This painting in one of my sketchbooks is inspired by some beautiful Swedish wool embroidery. I added some interesting info about this kind of needlework. For the text block I used my essential superfine pigment liner (I've used countless of them) and for the illustration I used gouache because of it's velvety effect. I notice that I'm not using watercolor a lot, only on occasional basis. 

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Although my favorite color is yellow, I also like blue in all its different shades. And since I love patterns, the link was quickly made  to  draw  a range of vases, plates and Chinese porcelain. The philosophy behind also matters: being busy drawing feels like Zen meditation, where the goal is to achieve a state of inner peace and clarity. 

Here are  some beautiful calligraphy pieces by my late father Jef Boudens, dating from the 60's, 70's and 80's. Mary White (English calligrapher) wrote the following  in The Newsletter of The Society of Scribes and Illuminators from 1982: "The thing that first strikes you is the incredible crispness of everything he does, whether lettering or illustration, and his superb and invigorating sense of design. One cannot generalize about his work because it is so broad in content, but he often uses variations on Gothic and Uncial forms and, of course, Humanistic Cursive, all used in an individual modern way.... There is complete harmony between the letters and any decoration he incorporates. The two together make one whole. The decoration, if simple, often has a wood-cut character." 
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A small selection of the exhibited work:

                                                                    Elmo Van Slingerland                                                                                                                                                    Werner Schneider

                                                                                                                                                                              John Stevens

                  Kevin Cribb                                                                                 Kristoffel Boudens                                                                                                       Tom Perkins

                                                                                                         Sepp Jacob                                                                                                                                                                      Pieter Boudens

                                                                 Katharina Pieper                                                                                                                                                                               Sarah More

                                                                       Christine Wagner                                                                                                                                                            Leonid Pronenko

A simple pencil drawing can be so satisfying. Slowly and carefully drawing, focusing on the area just below the pencil, observing every detail of the subject. I try to draw every day. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a Hungarian-American psychologist is the architect of the notion of  FLOW, which is “being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement and thought follows inevitably from the previous one. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.” And an old Chinese saying, quoted by David Hockney, says: “Drawing needs three things, the heart, the hand and the eye, two won’t do.” 

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.