My Weekend

I have Inet again, and hopefully my blog is back to normal now.
I had a great weekend. I was at a heavy metal gig, and I saw an exhibition about the graphical works of Albrecht Dürer. The concert was great, 4 hours of plain in-your-face heavy metal. Splendid. It may well be that I post some more concert pics, and/or write something more substantial about Dürer, but right now I have no time for that.
I also did a little bit of drawing, but you’ll have to scroll to the very end of the posting for that.

Yay for H.E.A.T!!!
They were the perfect opener – They are a newish swedish band playing 80ies style heavy metal. Absolutely great if that kind of music is what floats your boat.

Yay for All Ends !!!
Just as great as the rest of the evening. A band with two female singers, somewhere in between rock and metal.

Yay for Edguy !!!
The photograph does not show the lead singer, but is one of the best shots I got. I’m kinda small, that makes it hard to get good photographs on such occasions.

Yay for Albrecht Dürer !!!
I saw an exhibition about his woodcuts and other graphical works. Apparently he was the first one to use woodkut as a truly artistic medium, not just as illustrations for cheap, mass-produced books as before. He also took the medium to new levels, they are nearly as finely done as his copper engravings.
This one, Hironymus im Gehäus, is an engraving of course, but one of his most famous and it filled me wit awe to see an original copy of it. More of his works here (the ist is German, but easy enoug to navigate without understanding much).

Yay for being lazy !!!
This is the only creative thing I did this weekend, it is going to be a linocut that will be used to add some interest to my chicken scratch sampler. The white areas will be cut away. I used water a watersoluble white coloured pencil, you can “erase” it with a wet Q-tip on a lino plate. This is not what we learned at school about how to do linocut, but for me this is the quickest and most intuitive method to design linocut.

Stitch Explorer 1 – Chicken Scratch

It has started: Sharon B’s new challenge stitch explorer. We are supposed to explore an embroidery style or embroidery stitch every month. The first challenge is chicken scratch.
Well, this style of embroidery is completely new to me so I decided to explore the basics before pushing the limits. I’m not sure what gingham fabric is supposed to look like other than the weaving pattern, the one I got is thin cotton usable for shirts, the squares are 0,5 cm side length. Maybe I should have gotten one with bigger squares but I was not sure about long stitches on flimsy fabric.
I’m going to continue on this fabric for a bit, and get more fancy in little steps.

sketchcrawl

Recently I read about sketchcrawl. The idea is that people arround the globe meet in their hometown (or where they happen to be at the moment) and sketch. Someone at munich was looking for others to sketch with, so I decided to give it a go. I met Karin, a fellow fiber artist, and we had a wonderful day, although it was bitter cold (arround -7 degree Celsius) and I had forgotten half my things at home. Heck, we even went buying a brush halfway through because I had brought water-soluble wax crayons but no brush!

Well, we met in a cafe at Odeonsplatz, that’s where I did the first two sketches. The coffee pot is wax crayons, the building is done in conte crayons.

On we went to Siegestor to do our only plain air sketch of the day. It was done in charcoal and brown crayon. It was so cold I thought my hands will fall off although I had fingerless cloves on.

After that we went buying a brush and then headed for the next cafe. We ate, talked a lot and sketched the amarylis on the table. The sketch is watersoluble wax crayons, overdrawn with ink pen. Then we decided to call it a day this time and go somewhere indoors for the next sktchcrawl we do.

Well, quick sketches are not exactly my strongest genre, but it was lots of fun. If you happen to read that and live near munich, please check out the sketchcrawl forum and join uns next time round. The more the merrier.