The end of the month arrived faster than expected, and until I collected all the photos, I felt like I didn’t sketch as much as usual.

Back in December, I decided to take it easy on Patreon sessions for 2 reasons:
– The short, energy-binging days of the Nordic winter. It’s challenging to get everything done- from walking the dogs to painting and drawing- in the few hours of daylight.
– Recalibrating my focus and creative pole star. I needed to evaluate 2024, the themes in my work, and my focus for 2025.

One of the first things I started was a daily dog drawing challenge. As a true dog lover, I no longer found it acceptable that no dog ever appeared in my work, and even more so, drawing dogs overwhelmed me. Any attempt to get a dog to appear on paper felt like a blasphemous insult to these magnificent buddies. But no more!
No matter the outcome, I practice.

Even while struggling to get them on paper, dogs bring joy.

A second project I want to focus more on is my own art journal. I still feel slightly awkward and restricted as I tend to overthink or lose the genius ideas that I have in my car home by the time I get to the sketchbook 🙂
I want to work on:
– More text and reflections. I enjoy looking at text-rich pages in other artists’ sketchbooks, but somehow I never get around to writing more text. Too often I can’t find the right words and then I write nothing at all.
– Experimenting with different techniques and storytelling.

On Patreon, I did drawing sessions with Katie Moody and Emma Carlisle.

Katie’s sessions were all about inviting the sun from Rome. My knowledge of art history was gathering dust, so these sessions tied in nicely with the books I was reading. As a visual reminder, it will probably help to spend some more time with these buildings and focus on stylistic features.

Emma Carlisle surprised us with a very original session: “Freecycle John”. This man, a local from Emma’s village created fancy studio shots for a freecycle Facebook group. With these photo’s he promotes his photography sessions which collect donations for charity. Emma supported the charity and we got to draw John. a memorable session!

In another session, we traveled to collect grapes:

Drawing movie scenes:

And finally, these are from the first session of the year which was called “Kickstarter”- different subjects, different timers, fast and slow, all in the mix.

By now, February has started and I feel the urge to follow 20 Patreons and go all in but with such a short month, and still rather short days (+ I might be traveling), I have to keep it realistic haha.

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