Brüssel trip + sketches!

Last week I met up with the bf for a weeklong adventure in Brüssels, Belgium! My bf came directly from a three week bicycle trip through Etiopia (It's not vacation, it's exercise), so he was on board for the way I enjoy spending a vacation: Eating and looking at stuff!

We went to a lot of great food places. One of them was right near our hotel and was a Pho-fastfood joint called PhoPho: Cheap and really delicious! Another was a Lebanese restaurant where we were lucky enough to get a table before it filled up for the night. We ordered a ridiculous amount of food that we barely managed to finish, but did because it was so good! The flavors were so fresh and smooth I am still dreaming of their falafel! 

I also ate a lot of soup-of-the-day and cannot recommend it enough. Even the shabbiest places in Büssels had really nice, thick and smooth soup in leek, potato and cabbage flavor served with warm and fluffy bread, and they were just the thing when the weather turned sour on us! Brüssels really is more than clams and chips with mayo! (Which we did try... odd, but surprisingly good!)

Bonus mention: We stumbled upon the restaurant "Balls and Glory" which serves, you guessed it, MEATBALLS! I didn't eat there, but my bf did and he was all mmms and ahhhs over the dish he ordered. It's a new establishment and the staff was so friendly and enthusiastic! The guy we chatted to most, was an illustration graduate like me and we bonded over talking about why not to study illustration (which a hint of humor, of course!) + Their wine is really nice and you get apples and pears for snacking while you wait for food!

We visited several great museums and places, but my top three recommendations for doing Brüssels are: 

1. Belgian Comic Strip Center (10€)
   Totally worth the entrance price! Has features on history and mediums + So many lovely comic book originals and features a broad range of different Belgian/French comic book creators.
2. Museum of Moden Arts (8€ to 14€)
   We bought a ticket for the three permanent exhibitions (+ selected modern pieces) and even though we were there the whole day we couldn't get through it all! I recommend buying one ticket for either the Musée Fin-de-Siècle or Musée Oldmasters since they are huge and feature some amazing art! Modern was tiny and the feature piece you get to see either way when you wander in the Oldmasters section ;^) If you are a big fan of Magritte, the Musée Magritte is very nice, but if you only have a few hours, I'd do one of the two mentioned above.
3. City Tour (0€)
   Take a few days to walk around: Check out the different comic-strip-walls, find the pis-statues (Menneken Pis, Jeanneken Pis, Zinneke Pis), the main square, the general architecture + the "student" places near the mid/south part. So many nice second-hands shops and eateries/bars!

BONUS: Right now there is a free-for-all graffiti wall near Mont des Arts where I did a little doodle for inktober!

Bf was a good sport and brought books to read while I sketched in cafés and restaurants... what a great boyfriend! We ended up finding a "favorite" coffee place that was almost always full of people so we only managed to drink and sit twice: Café Capitale. Great coffee, nice seating areas, great people-watching-views and the nicest staff ever! One of the guys working there is going on a coffee tour of Scandinavia soon, so bf got to recommend some places and people to meet in Oslo/Bergen. Nerds. (JK!)

I didn't really want to do a lot of shopping since I had just bought myself new glasses before leaving, but my bf was adamant on going to every store since he is in dire need of updating his wardrobe to become less "youthful" to more "professional". I ended up splurging on the loveliest (and unpractical... seriously, it doesn't even close the whole way) coat from Benetton that I have been lusting after since I saw it in a shop window in Bodø. It was a a couple of 100NOKs cheaper in Brüssels, so I went for it!
So pretty!

We also took the short 1 hour train ride to Brugge, which is an amazing preserved medieval town: It felt like walking through a fairytale village and we popped into any and all tourist things we walked by. Just walking around was an experience, and I am contemplating moving there when I am an old lady and deserving of it's beauty!

Recommended for sharing: Belgian waffle with ice cream! It's so big I don't know how anybody can eat a whole one...!

Thanks for looking!

xAnneM

INKTOBER 2015 | Week #01

It's October again...! Where did the year go?
This year I am participating full on! No excuses, only ink doodles and black stains all over my desk. I'm taking photos of my sketches with my phone for the ultimate sketchy feeling + mini clean up in PS.
Enjoy!

And yes: I know the quality is pretty low, but I am hoping I will get less rusty and more daring as the days go on! Here is my first week of Inktober 2015.

Thanks for looking!

x AnneM

Norwegian Illustrators NO05, 2015

Today I got a package slip from the mailman. I usually don't forget what I order online and I don't really get stuff in the mail without notice from the sender so I was curious to what it could be. There was no sender name on the package slip image, so I was pleasantly surprised when I read Grafill as it's sender: It was the Norwegian Illustrators No 5 book that I attended the launch party for!

I saw it in person in Oslo, but I'm pleased to own a copy myself! I found a lot of talented illustrators in it that I wanted to look up on the internet and now I don't have to go through my shaky phone images! Hurray!

Featured is the spread by my old classmate Anette Oseng.
She is so amazingly talented! :^D

Oslo illustration trip, or Sandra and AnneM eat and look at stuff.

Two weeks ago my illustrator pal, Sandra, suggested a trip to Oslo to see some gallery shows and check out the childrensbook festival that was set to happen 17. to the 19. of September. Luckily the tickets to Oslo were pretty cheap, so we took that as a sign and went!

 

We ate at Mathallen two of the three days we had at our disposal... those pies were delicious!! We also got to go to Lille Saigon for pho and eat ramen in the park! It makes me almost wish I lived in Oslo, the food they have available is amazing! Yum!

 

There was a storm that we had been warned against... tho in my opinion it wasn't that bad. The rain was warm, the tempearture was comfortable and there was no wind. It was perfect weather to spend sitting at a café and drawing people hiding under their umbrellas. :^) (Note: I live by the ocean in the north. Wind is almost constant and the rain is alway cold and blowing sideways!)

 

We also got to visit a couple of galleries... tho our plan of going to the childrensbook festival kinda fell though, since most of it was aimed at children and we kept missing the few panels aimed at adults. Oh well! The ones we did visit was Grafill's galley, where one of our old classmates, Anette Oseng, had an image displayed (so cool!) and we got to see Tegnerforbundet's cartoon show where I bought Hundedagar by Anja Dahle Øverbye. Additionally, we went and checked out Blank Space for awesome prints, tho no life-drawing (so unfortunate!), the Norwegian National Gallery and Torso, an art supply shop at Vulkan.

 

 As a nice ending to the trip we met up with our online hangout group (KETSJUP) and had a live hangout at TGI Friday (one of the few places that would let my 21 year old friend in) and some drinks! Afterwards we got a tour of Gimpville's offices where one of our hangout friends work :^D Amazing! It gave us the best view of the Freia sign to date and we got to see where the fancy people work at haha ;^)

Thanks to Sandra's brother for a free place to sleep and her other borthers for a good time had! + bonus thanks to the wife of one of her brothers who made amazing thai food for us...! Seriously, I was afraid I'd have to be rolled on to the plane!

x AnneM