Nina Johansson

Six sketchers gathered at Citykonditoriet in central Stockholm yesterday,  for the 34th International Sketchcrawl – two new faces and a few “veterans”. We had a plan to move on to a museum, but decided to stay put – this café has lots of funny details to draw, and the lunch crowd tends to stay on for a while, so we had lots of opportunities to draw people.

Thank you Johanna, Charlotte, Anna, Pat and Riber for making this day a great one!

Top drawing: 20 x 18 cm, Namiki Falcon with Platinum Carbon black ink and watercolours on Arches Satinée 300 g watercolour paper.
Bottom drawing: 20 x 16 cm, technique as above but without the watercolours.

It´s time to tell what this December post was all about: I had the honor of doing the drawing for the spring program poster for the Tellus cinema theater in my neighborhood, and now it´s printed and out there. I sat in a shop window across the street from the cinema drawing this, it was a bit too cold for drawing outdoors.

Tellus bio is a super cozy place, a little cinema from the thirties, now run by a small organisation of local people. Apart from watching movies, you can come here to have a coffee, play board games, hear a lecture, listen to after work jazz, see a concert, join a life drawing session… It´s a great place for meeting people, and a true gem of Stockholm´s history.

Size A3 (29,7 x 42 cm), Namiki Falcon with Platinum Carbon black ink, and watercolours on Arches 640g watercolour paper.

I haven´t drawn anything in the sketchbook today. Instead I have been working on this bigger drawing/painting, of which this is just a tiny (enlarged) sneak peek. It´s a commission, but I don´t want to let you know what it´s for just yet.

It´s interesting to enlarge drawings like this. I know my lines are kind of wobbly, especially with the Namiki-Falcon with it´s super-flexy nib, but this looks half crazy! : )

And if you have any idea of what this is, don´t write about it in the comments, please. Thanks.

Approx. 7,5 x 9,5 cm, Namiki-Falcon with Platinum Carbon ink and watercolours on 600 g watercolour paper, probably Saunders-Waterford.

This is the rest of what I did on that day at Beckholmen. Drawings that go across the gutter of my sketchbooks usually don´t fit in the scanner, so I need to scan them in parts and put them together in Photoshop – which takes longer time, and time is not plentiful right now. The long wait between posts is due to exhibition preparations, so I have my hands full with all that needs to be done before next week. I´ll tell you more about it real soon!

37 x 17,5 cm, Namiki-Falcon with Platinum Carbon ink and watercolours on Arches Satinée 300 g watercolour paper.

Café Valand is one of my favorite cafés in Stockholm. The place was opened in 1954, and hasn´t changed since. Still the same owners. Entering is like going back in time. You can´t find a cappuccino in here, simply coffee or tea, with or without milk and sugar. Not a whole lot of cookies and cakes to choose from either, compared to other cafés, but everything is homebaked, with care. And the atmosphere comes for free.

17 x 17 cm, Namiki Falcon with Platinum Carbon ink and watercolours on Arches Satinée 300 g watercolour paper.

A more elaborate drawing today – sat down outside Sko-Wera at Odengatan to draw their amazing neon sign and retro store front. The owners came out to see what I was doing as they were closing up for the day, and told me the sign is from the fifties. It´s been renovated, but it´s still the same sign. It is gorgeous when lit, with green neon.

18,5 x 17,5 cm, Namiki-Falcon with Platinum Carbon black and watercolours, on Arches Satinée 300 g watercolour paper.

At Kungsholmen in Stockholm, along the quay at Norr Mälarstrand, someone has taken to extreme gardening. Several willow trees along the water are slowly dying from poison injected into drilled holes in their trunks.

I know – my ears fell off too, when I heard it.

Now the whole city is whispering about the buildings facing the embankment, thinking that someone living there must have done it, to get a better view over the water. Apparently this is not the first time this has happened. I did a search on some Swedish newspapers’ websites, and people are killing trees here and there, both in Stockholm and other cities, just to better the view from their windows. The funny thing is, it always seems to happen very close to the really expensive apartments and villas. Some just can´t get enough…

I would not want to be the next person in one of these buildings trying to sell an apartment facing the water – oh, the suspicion and the gossip…

19,5 x 17 cm, Namiki-Falcon with Platinum Carbon black ink and watercolours on 300 g Arches Satinée watercolour paper.

I love old cars and buses, and this one has caught my eye for a very long time now. I pass by it on my way to work. It is parked in an industrial area not too far from where I live, and I have been thinking that I should go there to draw it some day. It only took me about two years to reach that ’some day’, but hey, better late than never, right?

Judging from the red front, this one is clearly an old specimen from Stockholm´s local traffic. Someone did a good job trying to add some glamour to it with some gold spray paint, but somehow they didn´t manage to buy enough paint to cover the whole bus… Still, the charm is intact, don´t you think?

17 x 11 cm, Snowman ink pen and watercolours on Plano 270 g drawing paper.

Inspired by all the panoramas drawn during the Urban Sketchers symposium in Lisbon, I climbed Skinnarviksberget (Skinnarvik mountain – the ‘climbing’ is not really as great an effort as it sounds, though, it´s more of a height or a hill than a mountain…)  in Stockholm last week to try a panorama myself.

I usually find vast views incredibly tedious to draw, but this time it was ok. It´s almost meditative to sit and watch things happen from above, without taking part, just hearing a soft hum from a city in vacation mode. I had to go there twice to finish this, the heat was overwhelming the first time. I expected Lisbon to be hot, but Stockholm has been worse this summer.

42 x 17 cm, Namiki-Falcon pen with Platinum Carbon ink and watercolours on Arches Satinée 300 g watercolour paper.

I went sketching with Kim, Charlotte and Johanna today, at Tegnérlunden, a beautiful little park in the heart of Stockholm.

It´s a great place for sketching, you get all kinds of subjects here, from city street scenes to sunbathers on the grass. And as a bonus, a statue of Swedish author August Strindberg, flexing his muscles. How about that?

Top drawing: 19 x 16 cm, Namiki-Falcon with Platinum Carbon ink and watercolours on Arches Satinée paper, the others are drawn in a 19 x 13 cm sketchbook filled with 240 g Plano drawing paper.