My left hand sketched by my right hand...

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Just like sport athletes, a creator regularly needs to train his skills in order to keep in shape for artistic tasks whatever they might be. For this, when travelling by train for hours, I sometimes take my left hand as a model and roughly sketch it with my pencils and pens I carry with me in my "artistic survival" bag. Together with pigmented black fineliners of all kinds, these are mainly Museum, Supracolor and Prismalo pencils.

Time spent per hand: 20min.

An other day, still during travelling by train, I made a doodling of my left hand holding the crescent moon, executed in my sketchbook with black brush pen and coloured with kids Maxi Fancolor pencils:

Time spent: 25min.

Iceberg

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An iceberg as a symbol of frozen parts of our life beyond the surface of consciousness, with only the top visible for ships and passengers travelling nearby.
I painted this square 60x60cm picture by first applying different layers of black Acrylic with a spatule on a wooden board. After drying, I added a metallic turquoise blue Acrylic colour on top, with te spatule again.
With mainly oil pastels Neopastel I worked out the iceberg, slightly put on the left. In order to give some warm contrasts to this rather ice-cold atmosphere I added some "sunset lights" on the bottom of the iceberg. With horizontally layered, light Neopastel I then added some texture effects on top of the Acrylic background ("frottage technique"). No idea if such one exists in real, but I'm sure it sometimes exists somewhere in some of us.
I tried to let it look strong, dangerous but enigmatic at the same time. Whilst our "inner" icebergs should constantly melt, these "real" icebergs out there hopefully still continue to exist in the far future!

Time spent: 3 hours

Fantasy birdies

Welcome at "awecartoon", the blog of "awe"Adrian Weber !

Here's some funny joking around with ink and watercolour that wasn't meant to be figurative. Just by outlining with a black fineliner some shapes appearing by pure accident, I identified some fantasy birdies that whished to be born in order to spread the message of bird songs and colour…
With coverning white (Tipp-Ex) I highlighted some parts at the end.

Time spent on each bird: less than 5min.

From mountains and rocks

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Mountains rock! Just like trees and roots, rocks and stony structures are among my favorite subjects when drawing and painting since ever. When outside on holidays or wherever, I try to catch the shapes, the energy and the volume of these immobile witnesses of slowly flowing time…

Here are some samples in different techniques (oil, gouache, oil pastel, Luminance, fibre tipped-pen…), with the mountains "Niesen" and "Jungfrau" that are among my favorite mountains since ever despite the fact that the Klees, Hodlers and others had already made those…

Time spent for each study: between 20'-2h

Haunting spirits

Welcome at "awecartoon", the blog of "awe"Adrian Weber !

It was a strange and quite unique experience when some years ago, I spent 4 days and nights in an alpine cottage, alone, without social contact, only surrounded by daylight, night, mountains and forest. I used to draw and paint without interruption and once in the middle of the night I started working out strange faces coming out of a dark underpaint. The trick was to cover a canvas-like paper with a light acrylic colour in order to give a basic structure and texture. After drying, I covered it with a dark (umbra, black or ultramarine) oil colour. As oil colour doesn't dry quickly unlike acrylic, it allows you then to take away colour with a towel, which I did: Finger wrapped in a tissu or towel and then scratching away some oil colour…heads started to appear, I called them "Haunting spirits" or even "demons"…the point was that when doing this "exercise", these strange faces coming from somewhere started to scare me somehow and in order to be able to sleep, I had to lock them in.

  

Time spent for each "haunting spirit": 30'