Viking shield

There are hundreds of snowflake templates on the web. Some of them I downloaded and printed out, hoping they may become useful some time. Well, as I am practicing painting with gouache I thought:,  "Why not use one of them?" However, my goal was to transform these snowflakes into something different - and here it is - a snowflake turned into a Viking shield! Of course no one knows how these Viking shields looked like in reality - but why not paint something that could have been a Viking shield?

Playing with colours

Paintings like this are never planned by me. They happen. The only thing I think about in advance are the colours I want to use - in this case it was simple because they were leftover from the painting before. I don't clean my palette thoroughly - I only clean the mixings on the palette, so that there is place again for adding new blobs of paint.
I used a variety of brands - an indigo from Schmincke Akademie Gouache, a golden yellow from Lascaux Gouache, a brilliant blue from Reeves Gouache and an orange from Lucas Studio Tempera/Gouache.

Abstract Landscape

This abstract landscape was done with gouache and markers and a white acrylic paint marker. When I started the painting I had no idea what the outcome would be. I was just putting marks on the paper. Of course there was a moment when I thought that it would never come together, but I kept on painting. Considering that I have very little experience with gouache I am rather satisfied with the painting - and I decided to focus on that media. 

Cikada

This photo was taken on holidays in the Provence in the South of France. If you look closer you can see the insect sitting on the branch - one of the big cikadas which were producing a typical sound of the South of Europa. Mostly you could not see them but here we were fortunate enough to take a shot of little noisy critters.

Purple snowflake

This painting was my first kind of commission. I'd already done that snowflake, but with a completely different background design and a complete different colour palette. I'd made a card out of it and showed the card to a nice person in the restaurant which I use to frequent quite often. Sie bought it and said that she would like another one but with other colours.

Well, I actually did another one. This one is done with a range of media: watercolour brush pens, liquid watercolours and some alcoholbased markers, and of course, a white gel pen in the very end of the creative process. Today I went to the drugstore and had two cards printed out with this design.

Red Dragon

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I must admit, I love dragons. I love to look at them (I really didn't know how different they can be, all the Chinese Dragons, the Sea Dragons, the Western dragons!) and I love to draw and paint them. Here in Western culture dragons are considered to be evil beasts, which love to eat young maids and princesses. Eastern cultures consider dragons to be more positive, full of energy and power.

Blue and Purple Abstract

This painting has been done mostly with liquid watercolours, using the colours purple and night from Colorex, pebeo. Then I added some finishing touches with brushpen watercolours, using the ecoline brush pens and the tombow brushpens.