Week 8 of 2023 was a sunny but pretty cold week here in Düsseldorf. Sunny is good. First coffee outside on the front waiting for Filip to get back from school. I did exercise at Jackies boot camp one day and for the rest I have been for long walks in the nice weather. I walked down to Kaiserswerth to get energy from people, the beautiful cobble-stones streets and Rhein promenad.  Apart from exercising and enjoying the sun I have mainly been working on some new illustrations. Illustrations needs a lot of time to sit and work with layers and layers and new ideas as I go along. My plan is to add characters to my summer landscape, but what or whom I haven't figured out yet. It is very easy to get distracted and come up with other things to do when I am working on illustrations because it is so time consuming but it will be no pictures made if I don't actually sit and draw and paint. Don't get me wrong it is what I love to do but sometimes it feels like I am not doing anything, ...

The down-side of living our life in an international/expat community is that good people and friends are leaving to go back to their home-countries or to move on to new expat destination.  Expatriate often shorten to Expat = a person who lives outside their native country.  This summer our good friends here in Düsseldorf which relocated here at the same time as us in 2018 moved back to England. We will very much miss the whole family but are hoping that we will manage to go and visit them post Corona pandemic. As a leaving present around Midsummer I made this illustration/ family portrait. 

Christmas came and passed so fast this year. I never really got Christmas feeling although I did enjoy it very much. But not so very crisp Christmasy when it is 8 degres outside and kind of spring in the air. I started drawing Christmas cards in October but never managed to get anything done or send any... However I did manage to create one Christmas present this year. This is a family portrait of my dear friend and her family. 

I keep dream about that one day I will manage to put together a children book. It is a thrilling dream and I keep thinking about different stories and characters. I also draw some of my ideas while I am dreaming. In matter of fact I have since I was a kid being creating stories while I am drawing. Here is an illustration of a girl who loves all type of animals and who are imagine how life would be with these kind of different animals. Happiness and a lot of challenges handling the different characters. 

We moved from Prague exactly one year ago. I was very sad to leave in fact I don't think I have ever cried so much over a place. It was a hard time for us as we felt very lost in all the new and the changes. A year has past and after a pretty though period it feels like we are out on the other side and we are little less lost and much more positive all of us. It was great to head back to Prague in this positive spirit. I will write more and show some pictures in my next post. Just wanted to show a family portrait I made of friends. Always nervous to give a family portrait away when its not been asked for. I hope they liked it and can find some similarities at least in the setting.

I love these orders of family portraits. It is so challenging and fun to try to capture people and their personality in an illustration. This order I got from a friend to draw a friend of hers and to give the illustration as a present. I got some information and pictures to work from. In this case I had a lot of picture material on internet as well as she is one of Sweden's best dressage riders sucessfully representing Sweden in the last world championship, Jeanna Högberg . I sat up one evening and made this drawing and worked a lot with bright fun colors. I am happy with the result and hope that they also got happy with it. 

Sometime ago I made some illustrations based on comments from a Facebook post about how we Swedes living aboard see Sweden and Swedishness when we come "home". This was published in the latest issue of a web-based magazine called SMUL ( svenska som modersmål utomlands) a magazine for parents living aboard with kids having Swedish as a mother tongue. Very nicely put together don't you think. I also updated my webpage with all the orginal illustrations check it out here CCillustrator.com

I got a feeling to just let go of all plans and paint quick in watercolor using only two colors. I was also inspired by making patterns and match many different sketches together. This is the result of my playing. I put them with a washi tejp on the wall in my studio corner just so I could take pictures of them all together but I like them there and I have a hard time to take them down again. I might find some funky frames so I can put them on my wall permanently. 

Lately I am doing late night doodling while before bedtime. I am inspired by pattern design and the dream of being able to print my own fabrics in the future. I think I will color these but somehow I like them like this little more graphic and rough. 

This weeks theme on illustration forum Illustration Friday is Passion  For me horses has been my big passion since I was a small girl. I started to ride in the local riding school in Vingåker when I was four years old and only wanted to ride the stables biggest horse, Swedish girl aka Flicka. I still remember the disappointment if I had to ride one of the small Shetlands ponies called Jolly and Polly. At 7 years old I got my first own pony/bestfriend, Ballerina, the cutest of the cutest welsh mountain ponies who stayed in the family for 17 years. Ballerina was just as novice as myself and so everything we learned we learned together. She had a heart of gold to say the least. After Ballerina came Mr Herbie, Pojken, Pikona och many more through the years. So I more or less grew up in the stable where we (big group of girls in the same age) did more but sometimes less horsey oriented activities. And every other weekend was spent at competitions. The passion for ...

Most of my illustrations are based on myself, my family or other people around me and the scenarios are either self experienced or heard of. Lately I have been asked to draw family portraits. A great privileged mission which is fun, scary and challenging in a great mix. I want to capture the family ( without being able to make it photo like) as well as the surroundings to make it a fun identification of that specific family. I will put together a collage of my family portraits I have done but for now I start to present an illustration I made while I was in Sweden in October. A great friend of mine ordered a portrait of her sweet family. It was a fun mission to try to find artifacts and details that makes the illustration to fit them and who they are.