What a stunning month this has been. We got so much sunshine and beautiful days that the moody rainy ones felt extra cosy.

We’ve been rather busy too. The home and studio needed to be ready for the long and cold Nordic winter. That means a lot of things, from changing tires and cleaning up the garden to bringing out snow shovels and fixing cracked windows.  Soon everything will be frozen until spring, and probably/hopefully covered in snow too.

The nice thing about it is that anything that hasn’t been done yet (like painting the facade of the studio) is a job for next spring/summer. So for the next 6 month, we don’t have to think about it because nothing can be done about it.

Getting potatoes at my favourite place:

And I still have a thing with yellow ferries 🙂

This year is the first time that I managed to grow some pumpkins. Only one is rather big, but it’s progress. In the previous years I had mice eating all the pumpkin seeds, plants growing but no flowers, or nothing happening at all.
These were supposed to be my zucchini plants,… so obviously I have zero zucchini’s this year…

I have been drawing a lot, both for myself, a course and commissions.
Perhaps I’ll share some bits from the course in the future, but at the moment I’m enjoying my playtime and exploring the themes in my homework. It’s a course on visual narrative, a bit experimental, and super fun + interesting.

In October I joined the Patreons of Emma Carlisle, Frances Ives and Draw Brighton (life drawing).
This is from the nighttime animals session with Emma:

Drawing from the movie: Grabben i graven bredvid with Michael Nyqvist.
The intro scene is hilarious, I’ve been laughing out loud. But I also noticed the colour palette which I found inspiring (but I didn’t copy it accurately, rather made my own choices).

Recently, I got a few Pantone markers. The Swedish shop where I order most of my art supplies didn’t have all the colours, and I also wanted to test if I like this kind of markers. So I got one to start, enjoyed it a lot, and ordered a few more. Perhaps the greys were a bit too similar, but they are also very nice together. What seems to be missing from the colour chart, are some light/neutral options. Most colours seem to be rather intense and bright while I like building layers.
I still have the Tombows, but the biggest issue with those is that there is no refill ink and you have to get new ones every time.

As long as the sun was out, it was rather warm, but as soon as the sky turned pink it got cold quickly. But we came prepared to this birthday party with warm food, and wood for a fire to keep us all warm.

October didn’t bring is snow this year, but we were treated to the first frost! *happy dance*

The next few month will be a bit different than usual for us, one of my dogs needs surgery on her teeth, and I’m a bit unsure on how well my oldest girl will handle to cold winter. She will be 14 in March and while she has great coats and still has such a positive spirit, slippery roads and frozen or deep snow might be too much.
On the other hand, there is a lot of good and fun things to look forward to.

Wishing you all cosy autumn days!
x