How to use this Page

Add a Comment

Add a Comment

Add a Comment

These are my Day Three sketches of the Post Three Sketches in Five Days challenge.

Today I chatted with Koosje Koene, one of the founder members of Sketchbook Skool, on Skype, and we caught up on all sorts of things that had been happening, for both of us, since I went to Amsterdam last year to film my classes for Sketchbook Skool with her. It was good to talk. You know when just chatting with another person who has the same interests and passions as yourself can give you a boost? It can be uplifting and, well, the conversation left me feeling all inspired. So, it felt fitting to post these three sketches, that I made whilst I was there, in Amsterdam with Koosje, today.

If you are unaware of Sketchbook Skool (is there anyone who hasn't heard about it yet?), well, it's this online school where all the tutors are sketchbook artists from around the world. An eclectic mix of tutors who are pretty much obsessed with creating sketchbooks. In fact, there's no pretty much about it, they're totally obsessed with creating sketchbooks. And, that includes me! Yes, I'm one of the tutors on the 'Seeing' course which starts on Friday. Still time to sign up. You can do that, and find out more, HERE.

Add a Comment

 Here are the two sketchbook spreads that I mentioned in my last post. Both were made whilst in Amsterdam filming for Sketchbook Skool and both were finished when I got back home.

The top drawing is a drawing that I wanted to make when I went to Amsterdam. I guess I wanted to make it before I went out there. I knew that I wanted to get at least one drawing of those old Dutch tall, thin houses along the canal banks. But, that's not all. When I saw this drawing in my mind, this is the style and these are the lines I wanted to achieve. And, that doesn't always happen. Sometimes, I have no idea where the pen will take me.

The second is a sketch I made at Erasmuspark in Amsterdam. I just added colour pencil at home. I shouldn't have bothered with the lettering though.

Add a Comment

Last weekend I had a trip to Amsterdam to film my classes for Sketchbook Skool. I'll be a tutor in the second Semester, which kicks off on July 4th. I was met by the co-founder of the skool Koosje Keone and we spent two full days of filming.
I have to say I was more than a little nervous. I am not a natural in the front of the camera, in fact it's probably one of my biggest fears so if you are signing up to the second semester then please understand!
I really enjoyed the whole project, though. More than I thought I could, which was thanks to Koosje. I think we worked well together and I hope that my videos will be enjoyable, informative and useful, despite my awkwardness.
As well as filming we got to hang out in Koosje's neighbourhood a little. We ate some great food (those guys really know how to eat well) and, of course, we did a little bit of drawing.
I remember, at one point, discussing, with her, some of the other sketchers I'd met over the last few years and saying "some of them are REALLY obsessive, really hardcore sketchers". I then proceeded to make 17 drawings in my short stay! Turns out I might just be a little bit obsessive myself.
Here are thirteen of the sketchbook pages I made. I also did a couple of 'finish at home' jobbies - which I'll post later. And, of course, one drawing that will be revealed at Sketchbook Skool. The other sketch I made was so bad NOBODY will ever be seeing it. Koosje asked what I do if one of my pages goes wrong. I said "collage". Her musician husband, Pascal, said "ah, in music we call it a medley". I liked that quote.
One evening we sat outside a great restaurant, in the sun, where Koosje and Pascal are regulars. I drew the  guy in the cap, below, whom Koosje called 'an old sock' - which is an expression for a young guy person who has an old soul (I guess). Again, I liked that expression and the magpie in me will be flying off with these and storing them for future use.
Koosje also remarked on how quickly I made my sketches. That, again, is something I'd never noticed about my own drawing. And it came as a surprise to hear, as over the past few years I've sat labouring over drawings that take hours and hours and hours. But, she is quite right. It's true.
When I look at the drawings I made there it makes me realise how far I have come in the last few years. Just two or three year ago, I'd never have been able to do this stuff. I'd never have drawn people on the plane, in the park, having coffee. But that's what keeping a sketchbook or illustrated journal does. It's not just a place to document your life, but also somewhere to work on your skills and techniques.
 And, just one more observation I made on this trip; if you ever thought that being cabin crew was a glamorous job then you ain't ever been on the weekend stag-party flights from the UK to Amsterdam. Those guys deserve medals.

Add a Comment

The Klik! Animation Festival begins tomorrow in Amsterdam and continues through the weekend.

The quirky animation gathering has grown quickly in its first five years of existence. This year’s Klik! includes a full slate of competition screenings, special screenings ranging William Kentridge to Adventure Time, and a focus on the theme of violence in animation. The latter thematic emphasis is particularly intriguing, with programs related to “cartoon violence,” “serious violence,” and “disturbing violence;” screenings of the features The Suicide Shop and Watership Down; and a half-day symposium on violence with a line-up of speakers that include filmmakers, scholars, and psychologists.

And if all that animation isn’t enough, the festival will take place in the impressively futuristic EYE Film Institute, which opened earlier this year. I visited the waterfront Institute last summer, and it’s a perfectly inspiring space to hold an animation festival.

Below is Klik’s 2012 festival leader, directed by Lukas Krepel, Patrick Schoenmaker, and Joost Lieuwma:

Add a Comment

This summer, I wanted to do something exciting. Something I'd never done before. So I decided, rather on the spur of the moment, to go to Amsterdam (The Netherlands) for a month. Alone. To explore and to write, and to see if I could.

And I'm so glad I did! I rented an apartment a bit outside the city center with a gorgeous rooftop terrace that, once it stopped raining, I sat outside on and wrote longhand. I had forgotten how much actually writing helps me think through things.

I also met up with the awesome Corinne Duyvis, YA writer and Amsterdam inhabitant. She showed me the city and we even got a chance to do some writing in a coffee shop (the kind that actually serves coffee). The coffee shop had this cute little cubby upstairs where you could sit, but you couldn't stand.


Corinne


When I wasn't writing, I spent time just wandering around, and taking in the city. I don't think I could ever get tired of looking at the canals.


I had an amazing time. I didn't write the Great American Novel, but I did figure a lot of things out, explored ideas, and worked out a solid outline for a story I'm really excited to tell. I want to say thanks so much to my Sisters in Scribe for their patience while I was out of the country and not blogging. How about you? How did you spend your summer vacation?

Also, my short story THE LAST BEST DAY is up this week at Tangled Fiction!

Display Comments Add a Comment

Normally I would have waited until I had a few more drawings, from my travel themed Moleskine, to post alongside this one. But, I really wanted to say a few things.

Sometime last week Blogger made my blog a 'blog of note', and since then I have had a huge number of new visitors. So, I wanted to say a big HELLO to everyone who has recently found my blog. I do hope you like what you see and that you'll return in the future.

Of course, I can't just mention the newcomers without mentioning all my old fogeys. I mean, regular visitors. Thank you for returning, commenting and generally being lovely. Big CUDDLES to all of you.

Lastly, in this stomach churning love-in, a big THANKS to everyone who has bought my zines and prints. You help keep the wolf from my door. And, that gives me the time to draw.


(I'm really annoyed with myself for adding the writing to this one. It was much better without. Oh well, you win some, you lose some.)

Click on drawing to view.

Display Comments Add a Comment

Michelle Rafferty, Publicity Assistant

The forces of real estate development and rebranding campaigns are transforming urban landscapes around the world─and Sharon Zukin has seen much of it first hand. In the following podcast she explains what happens to the people when a city gains financial capital or decides to change its image.  Zukin teaches sociology at Brooklyn College and the City University Graduate Center, and is author of this year’s Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places.

Sharon Zukin: The basic industry of New York has been real estate for many years—the selling of land, the building of more expensive offices and apartments to replace the buildings that came before. This is just an unrecognized, really big part of New York City. New money from bigger investors comes in and drives out the people who are still paying low rents.

Michelle Rafferty: So Manhattan has become a place where many people who work in the city can’t actually afford to live there. Where else do you see this happening in the world, and how do we know when a city is on its way to becoming more elite or less diverse in terms of class?

Zukin: In every city of the world where the center of the city is redeveloped for the financial class and welcomes expatriates and transnational investors, that’s where the local population is being kicked out to the edges of the city. Yes it’s happened in New York, but it’s also happening in Shanghai. Yes it has happened in London, and Paris, but it’s also happening in Nam Ping. The centers of the city, in contrast to the 1960s and 70s have become valuable again. They’re valuable financially, they’re valuable logistically, they’re valuable culturally.

Rafferty: You just were talking about other cities in the world and I know you travel a lot. You get to see how a lot of other cities are changing, compare those changes to New York City. I know recently you went to Amsterdam, and specifically you saw what was going on in the Red Light District. I’m wondering if you can talk about that a little bit more, how that area is changing.

Zukin: The Red Light District has begun to look like a serious disadvantage for marketing Amsterdam. There’s even a kind of “I Love Amsterdam” campaign that copies the “I Love New York” campaign of the past few decades. So the new marketing of Amsterdam is more family friendly and really can’t deal with the drug traffic and the human trafficking of the sex industry. So there’s an attempt to evict those uses of the space and turn the windows of the brothels at least temporarily over to fashion designers and visual artists who display their work in the shop windows.

There was a very interesting exhibition at the Amsterdam Historical Museum this year that shows Ed Kienholz’s installations that reproduce the interiors of some of the very sordid rooms of the prostitutes of the Red Light District. But the exhibition also documents–in video form and in printed interviews–the desires of many of the prostitutes to continue working in the center of Amsterdam. There’s a curious dynamic of women’s control over their bodies and their work in a legalized prostitution situation, and the criminality of a lot of that industry, all of which is played out in urban redevelopment.

Add a Comment