drawing challenge

This weeks host for the DC is Patrice and her theme is "nude". As you have probably noticed by now I draw women ;-) And most of the time I think about issues as gender, feminism, women's rights but also beauty and how we look at ourselves and how society does this. So you would think that this theme fitted me perfectly, so did I at least! But I'm torn between two perceptions. My first thought was that I wanted to show something that expresses that you should be happy with your body. There are so many people (also men, but sorry, I don't like drawing men;-) who struggle with their body and how they look. I also have these times where I'm not happy with my body. But then I look back at pictures when I was younger and I see that I had nothing to worry about. I try to remember that when I have these times now. I probably will look back and think the same… So the first thing was: look at yourself and be happy about it!
But then I thought about al the nudity we see in papers, magazine and online. How we are used to these images of almost naked women who look perfect and we all want to look like these women even we know that most of them are photoshopped. That young girls think that the less they wear the better it is. So in the end this drawing turned out to be a mix of a proud women with a mirror who looks at herself but at the same time she looks like a supermodel who thinks what am I doing here? I leave it up to you, I could not make up my mind. And one last tip: do not google "nude" for inspiration… oh my, I'm so naive sometimes…

For more "nude" please visit the wonderful blog of Patrice who again made me think this week!

drawing challenge

This weeks host of the drawing challenge is Patrice and her theme is "upside down" with the question "what turns your world upside down?" For this week I just can't decide what to answer or which way to take it… My first thought -of course- was that I immediately thought about the really bad things that can happen to you, like loosing someone. Which really turns your world upside down, or in my case when I lost my mother: after 3 months it just hit me: the world keeps spinning… Then I broke down, nothing changes, I'm still doing what I have to do and so is the rest of the world, like nothing happened. But this does not happened on a daily bases ( really, it shouldn't!) and what I realized a while ago while talking to my sister because she has the same "problem". We both get really in stress if someone or something messes with our plans. That can be something little, like someone at work is sick and you have to fill in, which means I can't draw, which means there goes my week-planner. Nothing big, nothing with world troubles but I HATE THAT! That can even happen to me if the internet does not work for just one morning, but if I planned to do things where I need the internet, my world is Upside Down. Do you get it? I try to take that stuff an easier way but I find that very hard. So I choose a little painting which I made in 2010. I'm hanging upside down and my sister is standing next to me. My dad took pictures of us when we were children and I made paintings out of them. What I want to say I think is this: if your world is upside down, I hope that someone is right there next to you to catch you…

You can see all the 3 paintings I made Here and for more inputs on this theme please visit the wonderful blog of Patrice!

drawing challenge

This weeks host for the drawing challenge is my dear friend Roberto. Even if we never met, I think of him like a friend, because he helped me a lot with his comments which are serious and often funny at the same time and I'm sure he will say something about what I'm going to write here and I will think: he is so right! That happens a lot ;-)
So: Roberto's theme is "limits" or if you will "no limits".  I didn't have to think long about this one. I have one big limit and that is myself. Let me try to explain. I limit myself, my head does. I think to much. I question everything. I think ahead if there is no use because I can't influence the future. My limit is fear. Not in the way that I don't like roller coasters because I love that! But in the way that I'm afraid to take a step in the wrong direction, ruin things or hurt people. I know al this and try to take things easier, let this limit not influence my work because that would be the worst thing ever!
For this challenge I took a still from one of my older video works, made in 2004. I choose the first still because of the word "hey". The video has a lot of text in it, but for this "hey" fits perfectly. "hey" to myself: take it easy, do not limit yourself, don't be scared. Like a note to myself. The second still is just a big scream! I get soooo tired of myself questioning everything. I'm going to scream "no limits" right now!

For more limits please visit Roberto's blog, where you find lots of his great and funny illustrations. Thanks for stopping by this week and I wish you all a wonderful weekend!

drawing challenge

This weeks host for the drawing challenge is the wonderful Patrice and her theme is "food". Of course I had to play along with this one! Many of you know already that I have this other blog about food. If not: I draw the recipes I cook and vary them with funny or serious quote's about food. This blog is about nice food in spite of food allergies.

In short I tell you my relationship with food. My whole life I have been allergic for peanuts and nuts. I get really ill when I only eat a third of a peanut, I can't breath. At the same time I have been suffering with headaches, stomach-ache and I was always extremely tired since I was 9 years old.  The doctors never found anything and send me home. When I was 16 it turned out that it was better for me not to eat certain things, that's why I became ill. I did that for one year but I could not keep it up. I was studying and living my life and having fun and it was to expensive to buy all that special stuff. I was used to the head-and stomach ache so that didn't bother me much. Almost two years ago I became very ill. I couldn't leave my bed for almost two months and that was the point when it hit me: I had to change things and think more about what I eat. I still I have to deal with my head and stomach because my body can not tell me what is good for it  and what not because all those years I just ignored it signals. I am used to my diet now, it is not hard. What is hard for me is that I can't figure out the signals of my body but I just give it some time. I am 33 years old now and learning what is good for me after 24 years. I started the food-blog to deal with it and to give it a positive turn and maybe to help others who have the same problems.

Like Patrice said: food has a huge impact on out health and I think most people don't realize this. People often ask me what I eat, if I still have fun and eat things that are fun and if it is not a lot of work and if it's not easier to take pills. This tells me that we have a disturb relationship with food and that the answer "it is a lot better for me and my health to eat this way" should be enough.

For more food please visit the wonderful blog of Patrice and I wish you all a nice weekend!

drawing challenge

This weeks host for the DC is Tammie and her theme is "hat/cap". I thought about it and I wanted to show you one of my paintings where I used bunny-ears as a cap or something with the hair of Pippi Longstocking as in my drawings. You can all these things see as a cap or hat, but at the same time I found it a bit boring. So I thought I take this as a chance to show you a sneak-peek of the way I draw or sketch. It is a drawing with pencil I never finished and I never turned it into a painting, but who knows…
So this is a sketch of two sexy pigs dancing with nice hats. Can you hear the music? I can almost see how they are taking their hats of ;-) The second picture is a computer drawing of the same image where I wanted to try something with color and then didn't like it i think. The different ways I work this is…

If you still want to see bunny ears or pippi-hair, click on the links "drawing" or "painting" under labels on the right.
For more hats/caps go to the blog of Tammie where beauty flows!

drawing challenge

This weeks host for the drawing challenge is Ariane and her theme is "Nest". Last week I thought a lot about my mother, she would have turned 60 years old this week. It not that I'm mostly sad, I think a lot about beautiful thinks (luckily!) And at the same time I get a bit melancholic: thinking about times that never come back. Not only the special moments but at the same time the small things. Things that you never think about when it happens. I think I just mean life ;-) Of those moments you almost never take pictures. This is what this theme made me think about: leaving and changing your nest. This drawing shows my sister and mother more then 12 years ago I think. My sister loved to make crossword-puzzles and she sits at the kitchen table while my mother finishes her lunch after coming home from work. I made this drawing 7 years ago. Sometimes I wish I could go back in time to this old nest…

For more nesting (problems;-) please visit the wonderful blog of Ariane! And I wish you all a nice weekend.

drawing challenge

This weeks host for the DC is Patrice and her theme is "water". The only thing I can say about water is that I love it! Water has a magic attraction to me. I love the sea, lakes and I just love to swim in them. Unfortunately I do this way to little. A swimming pool would do it but my skin can't handle the chemicals in it very well. So why didn't I make a drawing of this? Well, I do have some happy-water-drawings but still I choose this one because I think water becomes and already is a problem on this planet. And especially clean water. It has become big business to sell us clean water and large company's are making money with it over the heads of people. Did anyone see the documentary "Bottled water" about the company Nestle? You should….  

Anyway, I tried to find some on my under-water pictures, I couldn't find them in time, but maybe I'll post one later this week, for the fun of it. Did you ever try that? Buying a camera you can use under water. Not a expensive one, one you can only use one time. It is so much fun, especially the results ;-)

Thanks Patrice for this theme and you should sure check out her blog! Also for some more water.

drawing challenge

This weeks host for the Dc is Kristen and her theme is "connection". As you might have noticed I like to draw people  ;-) so I'm mostly interested in connections between people. And the weird thing is that I not thought of the deeply connection you can have with someone but that sometimes you are just disconnected for a while. Even if you belong together you feel that the other one is on a different level.

It makes me feel uncomfortable if I notice this with strangers. You see two people, they belong together but they are not connected at all. I don't mean the ones who are having a fight, that is a different story. It looks like they are on a different planet, no threads of connection, but still….

For -I hope some more positive than mine- connections please visit the wonderful blog of Kristen! Have a good weekend!

drawing challenge

This weeks host for the drawing challenge is the lovely Nadine and her theme is "hair".  A wild guess: I'm not the only girl who is not at all happy with her hair. My hair is very thin and boring, it just "hangs" there. It doesn't matter if I go to the hairdresser, one day later it is just as bad. The only time I was happy with my hair were the 4 years that I had dreadlocks. Finally: my hair had volume!!! It still was a lot of work to make them look nice for such a long time but it was worth it. My ultimate wish is that I want curls and of course the one with curls straighten them out.

The other thing is that I'm also interested in the (mostly) female issues about hair, like Nadine already said "we cut it off rigorously in places where we really don't want it". Why do we do that? For ourselves or for our partners, because society at one point said we need to because a woman with hair on her legs/arms/vagina doesn't look good, sweet or nice? I found a really interesting blog about this theme. A girl started a blog called "Bare To Bush" where she documented the regrowth of her body hair after shaving most of it off. During that regrowth she realized that she has a lot to say about bodies and body images. I think this blog is not for every one but you should take a look!

For some more hair please check out the wonderful TinyWoolf blog!

drawing challenge

This weeks host for the drawing challenge is Ariane and her theme is "vase".  My feeling immediately with this theme was: I love vases! I just bought a vintage one which I really like. But my problem is to put flowers in them. The first thing is that I like flowers but I find it a bit sad to put them inside in water because they have to be outside, to grow in nature. So I don't buy them myself very often. I like to plant  seeds though and grow them myself. But once in a while someone buys me flowers and then I have this second problem and that is why I made this drawing. I can't seem to put in flowers nicely in vases! The flowers are to big, to small or the vase is to big or to small. To little flowers for my vase, to many flowers to fit in the vase and so on. It looks sad or just to a bit okay. The best thing is when someone buys me flowers and they are already in a vase, haha, perfect! So that is what the drawing is about: a big vase with to little flowers. Not in a nice design way which you see sometimes, but in a "I try but I can't help myself" way.

For more vases go to the blog of Ariane, she makes the most wonderful pictures!

drawing challenge

This weeks host for the drawing challenge is my wonderful blog-friend Stefanie and her theme is "daily project". I find those kind of projects great and every year I think to myself that I should start one to, but at the same time I'm scared that I can't keep it up for one year. This year I didn't start it because so much was going one with moving to another city and that sort of stuff, I did not know where to find the time for it. But for the last two weeks I had a daily project which I introduced to you HERE. It turned out to be a bit more work so I'm still working on my "thread-thingies". Not everyday anymore, but bit by bit now. I wanted to see how it looked on our door in the hallway so that's is why I worked on it for every day. Now I can slowly finish it and do something else in between. I made one big one for the door on the other side of the hallway:

For more daily projects please visit the wonderful blog of Stefanie!

drawing challenge

The first drawing challenge of this new year and it is hosted by Tammie Lee and her theme is "numen": "the spirit or divine power presiding over a thing or place, or devine presence referring to the idea of magical power residing in an object or place".

A perfect theme for me to start this year! I always collected things, objects, stones or stuff that people made for me, I surround myself with them. I feel protected by them and I hope that they give me strength. They make me feel safe. To have stones or plants in my home gives me the feeling of the power that nature has, the beauty of it. And because I moved to a new place, me and my boyfriend are searching for a commination of our "spirits", to combine our little things were we find magic in. Now I think of it, that went really easy, to find places for our things and let them be next to each other. Like in the picture above. Between the stones you can see small woman made out of clay. I made them years ago for a project. These were not not the ones I used, but I kept them because they give me the felling of power-woman, like mother earth, ha!


The next picture is in my studio. It's a combination of the things I made and a drawing that Roberto made for me which is very dear to me. I look at it if a doubt myself as an artist and it makes me smile that someone who I only met through blogin made something for me, it is a positive vibe!

The last picture I like to show you are real spirits, at least I hope so ;-) They are from Finland, Africa, Greenland and again Africa. They were all gifts to me from my parents and sister. I hope they do get along, standing so close to each other. I hope their powers work together...

This time no drawing but a sneak-peak into my home. This theme fits so well in the situation that I'm in right now that I decided not to draw for ones.

For more spirits please visit the wonderful blog beauty flows!

drawing challenge

This weeks host of the DC is the great Nadine and her theme is "garland". I only put up garlands at birthdays, never at christmas, but since it is that time of the year I thought I make a garland with a christmas-touch! I think garlands make a party very festive, that is the feeling I got with this theme. So I tried to make a festive drawing: girls wearing beautiful dresses, nice hair and red lips and a fancy couch in the room. But the first thing a thought about with this theme was the balance act I always have to make while putting the garland up! Or is that just me? Finding the right spot to put it and putting it that way that is doesn't fall down. Balancing on a chair because I don't want to get the ladder. So that was the most important thing I wanted to draw. Off course I don't have fancy shoes in my other hand, then it would all go wrong!

For my other blog about food I had a reason this week to put up a garland. If you want to know why, click here (in dutch and english).

For more garlands, please visit the wonderful TinyWoolf blog!

a sweet memory

I just wanted to say "thanks" to all of you who left a comment on my last post. You all took the time to write something about what the painting did to you. I really touched me to read your words. I wasn't emotional or melancholic when I wrote it, I just had a wonderful memory with it. But somehow you felt what I mend with my little words. Sometimes I still get overwhelmed that it is possible to share emotions over the internet, to meet nice people who care and understand what you are trying to do. This painting is from the same series with oil crayons, I thought I share one more with you. Thank you again and have a good week!

drawing challenge

This weeks host for the DC is my dear friend Stefanie and her theme is "swanlights", the title of a music piece by Antony Hegarty. I didn't know his music and the things that inspired me to show you this work of mine were the words that popped into my head while reading Stefanies words, see the images of her invitation and listen to this music piece: blurry, mystical, not clear, foggy and melancholy. Maybe the last word has something to do with the "swanlights". I get the feeling of lost days, things that happend and you can't turn it back. I had to think about some of my older paintings. I made these when I just finished the art academy in Switzerland and moved back to my parents house. I started to paint again, this time with oil-pastels, which is more like drawing with your fingers... I tried to make these paintings blurry, with no hard lines. In these days my mother was sick again and I remember her coming to my studio to see what I was doing. This girl in the painting is trying to catch something, maybe some swanlights....

For more "swanlights" please go to Stefanies blog!  Her work is wonderful so you should browse through her blog anayway ;-)

drawing challenge

This weeks host of the DC is Kristen and her theme is "Everyday Objects". I once told you that I sometimes make these cabinets. I use my own drawings for them and my collection of (vintage) toys. I love small toys! Maybe you think that toys are not really everyday objects, for kids maybe. But let me tell you that for me they are! My room is full of them ;-) For this cabinet I used to drawing I posted for my birthday and added some balloons to it. I put the little "smurf" with the gift in front of it and empty my punch-machine for the confetti effect. Some of the colored ones I glued to the glass on the front. It is hard to take good pictures of these cabinets because of the reflections in the glass, I hope you get the idea. In the next two pictures you can see that I can move the confetti the way that I like it:

If you want to know what the others made for this DC go to the wonderful blog of Kristen!

drawing challenge

This weeks host is Ariane and her theme is "Autumn". I can be very short about this one: I love autumn! I love the color of the leaves, the very special, beautiful light when the sun is shining and I don't mind that it gets darker and the days shorter. I like putting on my warm sweaters and drink lots of tea, very cosy on the couch ;-)

For more autumn impressions, visit the wonderful Rose blog!

drawing challenge

This weeks host is Kristen and her theme is "homage". I have a lot of things I would love to bring a homage to, like pencils, paint brushes, paper and so on. But of course I want to dedicate this to an artist. I get a lot of inspiration by woman artist, also because of their theme's, like Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas, Kiki Smith, Cindy Sherman, Jenny Saville and Niki de Saint Phalle (click here for my love for her work). But my homage goes to Pipilotti Rist, a video artist. I studied video and performance art in Basel, Zwitserland from 2003 til 2006. I was already a big fan of her work. In my second year I found out that she had studied at the same school in the eighties! And one of my teachers was in a band with her. I loved to hear the stories and see the images of that. Anyway, as I finished school I made some animations and then started drawing again. In 2009 I heard about a competition were you could make a video inspired by Rist. I did that and it was the last video I made. But who knows... I love the colors she uses and I tried to show that in my video which you can view here. Not my best work but I wanted you to see it ;-) I always acted myself in the videos but in this one it's my sister. It has sound!

For more homages please go to the lovely blog of Kristen and have a wonderful weekend!

drawing challenge

This weeks host is birthday girl Stefanie, so first of all a big HIP HIP HURRAAAYY! Happy birthday to you my dear and I hope you have a wonderful day!

Her theme is "cup" inspired by the great artist Meret Oppenheim and to bring your own cup to the birthday party. I thought about what to show you here, because I have this love for cups and crockery. I have several favorite cups for my tea: new ones, but also from my childhood and some of them are so precious I don't use them, I only look at them. But then I remembered a drawing I made a while ago for my society6 shop. A drawing with tea cups in combination with a sentence I love. So this one it is.

I wish you all a great weekend, with some creativity and tea, and for more cups please go to Stefanie's blog!

drawing challenge

This weeks host is Patrice and her theme is "Maria". And what a challenge it is! At least for me, because I'm not religious. And that is a bit of an understatement because I think it is absolutely not okay the way religions treat woman. They are not equal to men, they are unclean and have nothing to say at all.  I think the problems we have with women's rights are partly because of religions. But that is not the theme, is it? And I could go on and on and on about this;-) So I thought a bit about that poor Maria... who had to give birth to a baby without having sex. They had to make up a story so at least one woman in this world could be clean and holy. But I think she knows what really happened and was not allowed to tell and had to live with that secret.

To see more Maria's, check out the blog of Patrice!
(and I'm sorry if I offended anyone with my Maria drawing, but that is sometimes what art does, isn't it?).