Nina Johansson

Thank you so much for all your get-well-wishes, I appreciated each and every one of them! I´ve been invisible for a while, I know, but not because the cold defeated me. I was actually drowning in pens! Man, I had too many pens! I never thought I´d say that, but it´s true. I didn´t even use half of them. Went through some drawers full of them, and threw out 93 pens. I kid you not. 93! And it´s not like I don´t have any pens left now… Doesn´t that seem just a wee bit… obsessive to you?

In the process of clearing out pens I found a Pilot V5 Grip that will stay on for a few more days before I toss it out. It´s nice on this bad paper I´m using right now, but I don´t like the way it skips a line now and then, and I don´t like the fact that it´s not waterproof. It messes up the watercolours.

The bedside table drawing was inspired by Michael Nobbs who draws a lot of stuff around his house. Check him out, you just gotta love his drawings!

12,5 x 17 cm, Pilot V5 Grip on some unknown sketchbook paper.

I´m having a cold. Stayed home from work yesterday and slept the whole day. Alvedon is my friend.

13 x 13 cm, Copic Multiliners and watercolours on sketchbook paper of unknown brand.

The weather is extremely grey in Stockholm right now, with a drizzling rain making it impossible to draw outside. I sat in a café yesterday, and the view out the windows was so dreary I drew the coffee cup instead. The coffee turned cold before I remembered to drink it, I was a bit caught up in the drawing…

10 x 14,5 cm, Lamy Safari with Noodler´s Polar black ink, and gouache on crappy brown paper (because I forgot my real sketchbook at home – can you believe that?!).

It´s been an extremely gray day in Stockholm today, so I made a gray drawing out the window of a little café I had never been to before. I like the contrast between these two buildings, one new(ish) and very strict and one old with odd angles and windows.

12,5 x 13 cm, Lamy Safari with Lexington gray ink and watercolours on some sketchbook paper.

Today was the 21st international sketchcrawl (check here if you haven´t heard of it before), and for the first time the Stockholm crawl had more than two participants. Yay! There were ten of us sketching at Kulturhuset, a huge building full of theaters, restaurants, libraries and other cultural activities, situated in the heart of the city. While we were sketching, a huge anti-war demonstration took place on the square below us, we had full view of the mass of people down there.

Most of the participants in today´s sketchcrawl were new acquaintances to me, and I´m so happy there are people in my own city that love sketching, just like me. Thank you guys, for making my day!

Top drawing: 12,5 x 17,5 cm, Lamy Safari with Noodler´s Lexington gray ink and watercolours. Second drawing: same measures, Lamy Safari witn Noodler´s Polar Black ink. Both on a rather crappy sketchbook paper.

One last drawing before the year ends. Our kitchen view again, this time in a cold winter light. The snow disappeared before Christmas, but the winter weather is smashingly beautiful anyway, with bright sunlight and a few degrees below zero.

I want to thank all of you who followed this blog during 2008, your comments and emails have meant a lot to me, you all make blogging well worth the time it takes. You are all a great source of inspiration to me.

Happy new year to all, and may your 2009 be a year filled with sugar and just enough salt to make life interesting!

Love,
/Nina

A window paper star in a Stockholm café brings my best Christmas wishes to you all. No snow where I am, but I’m sure Christmas will come anyway.

I decided to try different themes on my weekly drawings, just to get some variation. Last week I went for Jan Vermeer van Delft. I like the light in his paintings, usually coming from a window on one side of the scene. He captures it so beautifully, and trying to translate it into ink hatchings was not really doable, but a fun challenge.

Week 48 didn´t get a weekly drawing, I have had so many other things to do. I don´t want these weeklies to become a chore, so I just skipped it this week.

26 x 17,5 cm, Lamy Safari with Noodler´s Polar Black ink and watercolours on unknown sketchbook paper.

The whole eastern part of Sweden had a snow storm last night, and it kept snowing most of the day today. Everything sounds muffled outside, the gray gloom of autumn suddenly turned bright white and everything is so beautiful. And of course, since this is Stockholm, the traffic is total chaos.

The first drawing is the view from my office at work, suddenly a very aesthetic and clean image. The second is the view from our kitchen window a little later in the afternoon. You´ve got to love winter when it shows itself from it´s best like this. After the storm, that is.

15 x 10,5 cm, Lamy Safari with Noodler´s Polar black ink and Faber Castell coloured pencils on some crappy brown paper.

This week´s drawing took me a week and a half to finish. I´ve realized my weeks contain pretty much the same things, same habits, so I´m finding it hard to find new stuff to draw that interests me. I´ll be trying some themes for my weekly drawings for a while, to get some variation in them. We´ll see where that leads…

26 x 17 cm, Deleter Neopiko fineliner and Lamy Safari with Noodler´s Lexington gray ink on some paper I don´t know the name of.