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Here are 12 spreads in my Moleskine book. All very different besides maybe the patterns. I still do a lot of lettering but calligraphy pens are not in the picture anymore. Nowadays, I mostly use fine pigment liners, gouache, watercolor, colored pencils and Posca pens.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I'm immortalizing important objects in my life. When I was 19 years old I made an adventurous trip to Afghanistan. Along the way, in the pasar in Istanbul, I bought this so-called kelim. Its actual colors have faded, but for this color pencil drawing I've brightened them up!
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Just a new page in my big sketchbook. These names are of people who mysteriously disappeared at sea during the last 75 years and whose whereabouts remain unknown. Many disappeared while on voyages or traveling via aircraft. I thought it a worthy opportunity to pay attention to these sad cases.
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I'm working on a book, inspired by the journals of my maternal grandfather. The biggest part of his diaries is about World War I, but there are also stories and anekdotes of when he was a child, getting into mischief with his friends. He grew up in a very small village in West-Flanders where his father was a forester for a castle's lord. At the age of 16, he emigrated to the USA with his parents, brother and little sister. It's been a revelation to read these two diaries and to find out how his life was. I've already made a page about his life during WWI and I hope that other pages will follow!
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I've been very fortunate to host a workshop in Torino, Italy. A city that I didn't visit yet and I was pleasantly surprised by its beauty and its old history! Since I came back, I started a new concertina book about all the fantastic things I saw. Below, you can see a small map of the city center where I taught and where I stayed in a splendid palazzo. And how much I enjoyed drawing this map as precise as possible! I'm pretty sure that I'm going to draw other maps in the future.
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Not my own work this time, but from my talented daughter. For her Master's project she worked on this children's book about jazz and jazz musicians. Since the target audience are children, she used animals alternating with musicians and charming short stories about their lives. There was also a CD included with songs from the book. Below some spreads of JAZZZOO!
