Nina Johansson

Another drawing from Rome. Top left is not my work, it´s a ticket to the old Fori Imperiali (don´t know if that´s grammatically correct, but you know the area I´m talking about). Goodlooking, though.

17 x 20 cm, Lamy Safari with Noodler´s Lexington grey ink and watercolours on Fabriano Rosapina paper (sketchbook page).

We went to Rome for a week to get a taste of spring. End of February is when you start craving spring in Stockholm, so Rome seemed like a perfect choice. We got some really warm and sunny days, and didn´t get any of the horrible storm over Europe. (Click the images for a larger view.)

My baggage got lost during the flight, though, and when I got it back after four days all my make-up (not that much, but still) and my Noodler´s Lexington Grey ink was gone. I can understand the ink, but I´m still wondering who took my old make-up…

17 x 20 cm, Lamy Safari with Noodler´s Lexington Grey ink and watercolours on Fabriano Rosapina paper (sketchbook pages).

There is a lot of snow in Stockholm right now. A lot. Some say more than it´s been in the last thirty years. The day before yesterday the underground gave up because of the cold, along with the commuter trains, which of course strikes hard on a city like Stockholm. Some people got angry, others got dressed and started walking.

I didn´t draw this from life, -16° C is below the limit for my fingers. I took a reference photo while walking to a station where they said the underground to town might work. Cold, yes, but it was an incredibly beautiful winter´s day.

17 x 11 cm, Uni pin fine line and watercolours on Fabriano Rosapina paper (sketchbook page).

In periods of less time for drawing, I like to do these “week drawings”. This one lasted for almost three weeks , but I usually try to fill a page in one. It feels good to know I have an ongoing drawing that I can just keep working on anytime, without pressure to finish anything, and without sticking to a certain subject. And after a week or so, I try to tie the whole thing together with colour or crosshatching or something. Quite fun, and a good feeling to at least draw a little, even if I don´t have much time.

16 x 19 cm, Lamy Safari with Noodler´s Lexington grey ink and watercolours on Fabriano Rosapina paper (sketchbook page).

The life drawing sessions I often go to started again yesterday, after a holiday hiatus. They take place in a little 1930´s cinema theater near where I live, and even though it´s not perfect to sit in a cinema chair to draw (I usually stand up), and the lighting is less than great, it´s never crowded and the atmosphere is always nice.

This is a ten minute pose that I think turned out ok. I used watersoluble pencil and a waterbrush, which worked really well to get a little bit of shading in a short time.

About 24 x 10 cm, watersoluble pencil and waterbrush on cartridge paper.

We drove 700 kilometers today, through a cold and snow-covered Sweden. I grabbed the opportunity to do some sketching in the car, since I was not the one driving at the moment.

15 x 8 cm, pencil on Fabriano Rosapina paper (sketchbook page).

Happy holidays! I hope everyone is having a wonderful Christmas!

8 x 9 cm, Uniball eye pen and watercolours on Fabriano Rosapina paper (sketchbook page).

Before all the Christmas joy begins, I want to tell you how things went with Aspudden public bath, that I have posted about before. (If you missed the earlier posts, they can be found here, here and here.)

The struggle to save the bath continued outside the building after the police ended the occupation. People demonstrated, formed a Bath group to raise money, held meetings, went to Municipal government meetings trying to talk to politicians – you name it, they did it. The bath and the demonstrations around it have been mentioned in both local and national newspapers and TV news, but to no avail. The politicians would not listen, and the demolition started from inside the bath, with police guarding the outside.

On the night between Dec 9 and 10, the demonstrations to save the bath were called off. The cars parked in the middle of the street outside, to prevent the excavators from reaching the bath, were moved. At midnight a large number of people from Aspudden (including myself) marched past the police guards to lay down roses in front of the bath. A very sad moment, and many of us had tears in our eyes. A few days later the last walls of the building were torn down, and now the site is just a pile of dust and snow.

I don´t often post photos, but I just happened to photograph the bath sign on the 24th of November – which turned out to be the last night the sign was lit. I´m posting it as a little tribute to a bath that was in use the whole time from 1919 to a few months ago.

Big cities can seem so anonymous sometimes, and the people living there a bit jaded, and you often get a feeling that no one really cares what happens around them. But in this case both old and young – ordinary people! – stood up for their beliefs. In the process, a lot of people got to know each other and I know Aspudden is a few degrees warmer now, in spite of the snow. I am so proud to live in a community where people care about their surroundings and are ready to give their time and efforts to try to change things for the better.

15 x 13,5 cm, ink on Fabriano Rosapina paper (sketchbook page).

Found a new toy today in a store, a water soluble pencil. I think I actually had one of those once, but I never really used it. I bought two, a 2B and a 4B, and played around a bit. I like the way the water smoothes out the graphite without rubbing out the lines completely. You can keep working on top of the washed surfaces with more graphite, getting much darker traces.

For those of you living in countries where poinsettia is more like a bush or a tree – in Sweden we buy them in December, in a pot, and every Swede get all Christmassy inside when these turn up in windows everywhere. People don´t usually keep them longer than a few weeks or until the red has disappeared – poinsettias do not fancy our climate, so the red leaves don´t come back.

17 x 18 cm, Koh-I-Noor Hardtmuth “GIOCONDA” Aquarelle pencils and watercolours on Fabriano Rosapina paper (sketchbook page).

I ran some errands in town this afternoon, and took a break in a café at Odengatan, where this girl was studying (”plugga” in Swedish) something very intensely.

I couldn´t help but trying to capture her on paper, it is so rare with people who sit still when you try to draw them!

Some news here on the blog: I have been trying to figure out how to get threaded comments to work, so I can answer the questions I get in the comment section in a neat way, and it seems I´ve solved it! So if you pose questions to me, please don´t forget to check back for an answer!

7 x 11 cm, Lamy Safari with Noodler´s Lexington grey ink and watercolours on Fabriano Rosapina paper (part of a sketchbook page).