Nina Johansson

A quick value sketch of nothing much. Used a mixture of Perylene violet and Winsor green (blue shade) for the grey.

17,5 x 12.8 cm, Snowman ink pen and watercolours on Plano drawing paper.

Photographing with an analogue SLR is like drawing directly in ink – there is no undo option. I always let my photography students make a few analogue photos using these very manual cameras, partly to make them concentrate on getting the focus right and understanding the light meter, and partly because working in a darkroom explains a few things about Photoshop. Before they go out to shoot some pictures for the first time, I always remind them that they have to advance the film before they capture the next image. Their answer is always “Why?”.

Poor things, they are so young. They never knew anything but digital… : )

17,5 x 12.8 cm, Snowman ink pen and watercolours on Plano drawing paper.

Ran some errands in town and had lunch at a café. Nice to draw some people for a change.

17,5 x 12.8 cm, Snowman ink pen and watercolours on Plano drawing paper.

It´s hard to keep up with drawing every day for a whole month. Yesterday a nice evening with colleagues came in between. I just made up a new rule that nice evenings with colleagues are a legit reason for breaking a drawing challenge for a day. : )

17,5 x 12.8 cm, Lamy Safari with Platinum pigmented sepia ink and watercolours on Plano drawing paper.

Tried my hand on doing self portraits, the left one is almost halfway there, the right one isn´t me at all. Or maybe the eyes are, just a little.

17,5 x 12.8 cm, Snowman ink pen and watercolours on Plano drawing paper.

Another piece of essential equipment.

17,5 x 12.8 cm, Snowman ink pen and watercolours on Plano drawing paper.

More bicycle gear. These are indespensable right now. It´s dark when I go to work, and it´s dark when I start my ride home again.

17,5 x 12.8 cm, Snowman ink pen and watercolours on Plano drawing paper.

Time to change the tyres on the bicycle. The winter is unusually late in Stockholm this year – still no snow – but they say it´s coming this week.

17,5 x 12.8 cm, Snowman ink pen and watercolours on Plano drawing paper.

I think guitars (and other string instruments – cellos, violins, ukuleles…) are difficult to draw. They are kind of awkward to fit onto a page, bulky at one end and very narrow at the other, and everytime I try to draw one, I end up with more of a symbol of a guitar instead of an actual individual guitar. I draw the kind of image any human being would recognize as a guitar, but hardly That Particular Guitar, if you know what I mean.

So, to try to do something different with this instrument, I have been looking at my guitar from all kinds of angles, turning it this way and the other, trying to find a view that would be less typical. I ended up with this very shortened view that I find kind of interesting.

This was a really fun drawing to make. I draw a lot, and I think I have a pretty decent perception of proportions, and I usually don´t check relationships in my drawings very much, other than with my eyesight. But this time I had to use the pen for measuring here and there. I couldn´t believe my eyes when the head stock looked higher than the whole body of the instrument, but there it is – it IS higher, from this angle. Challenging for a brain stuck in symbol mode. : )

17,5 x 12.8 cm, Snowman ink pen and watercolours on Plano drawing paper.

Oh boredom. This is truly an everyday thing, but it is IMPOSSIBLE to make a drawing of a computer look interesting…

17,5 x 12.8 cm, Snowman ink pen, Gelly gel pen and watercolours on Plano drawing paper.