2017: New Year + Finished Sketchbook!

Happy new years!

This year has gone by way too quickly and I have been much too busy to keep up with my side-projects, update my blog AND have a life, so the blog and life was nipped in the bud ;^)

I think I managed about.. half-ish of last years resolutions, which means I managed to finish the sketchbook and tried, valiantly, to get up early. The rest just fell off the wagon named "life." Oh well!

NEW YEARS RESOLUTIONS:

• Run every week! Need to be in a good physical shape to be in a good mental shape! Which coincidentally lines up with my last years "Get up early", since I really enjoy running in the morning. One stone, two birds. 
• Get in bed early and read before sleeping. Since this makes me not only sleep better, but fills a "read more books" resolution.
• Fill a 2017 sketchbook.
• Finish one of the many projects I have outlined in my notebooks.
• Keep having fun Ketsjup meetings!
• Go to Oslo and hang out with Ketsjup IRL.
• Learn how to play a song on my ukulele.
  

SKETCHBOOK 2016

I finished my 2016 sketchbook after hiking up my doodlin' pants and filling the last pages during the Christmas holidays. I switched out the heavy paper sketchbook after realizing, I'm just not that kinda girl... thin, low-quality paper is where my heart lies. There are some 2015 illustrations in it from the Brussels trip, but whatever: Look at the flapping pages! Next year, I hope to finish well before the Christmas holidays and do even more digital illustrations since there were few this year...! Wish me good luck.

Some stuff from the sketchbook: Mostly pens, since pencils are hard to edit and the paper is super smudge-y. Hurray for my love of low-quality, cheap sketchbooks!

My dad napping! (Sorry dad.)

I had about... 5-6 pen doodles of my friend Hanne, who was kind enough to sit still while I eyeballed her. Thank you!

Unfortunately, I realized that almost all the people I sketch are nude, and I try to keep my blog PG-13 ;^) + I started doing small "thumbnail" sceneries from windows. It was pretty refreshing! 

Here's to 2017! 

Thanks for looking!

xAnneM

Spring//Summer

Woah!

Time ran away with me:

This winter has been pretty busy! I've been "rented out" (sounds so seedy...!) to a huge company, working on improving the structure of their webpages and helping with publishing, so I have been working a full 100% hours with not much time for personal work in addition to my coursera/skillshare courses and small freelance gigs. Luckily I have the weekly Ketsjup meetings and Bodø D+D once a month to keep my creativity flowing... hopefully I will have something to show soon!

It haven't been all work...
I've been doing a lot of fun things this winter like:

1. Learning how to snowboard (Ouch! So many bruises) -That sweet taste of satisfaction when I managed to turn both ways will stay with me until next winter!
2. Going on cabin trips.
3. Playing ALL the board- and card games (Totally related to all those cabin trips). 
4. Moved into the corner of our sofa -Building a fort of pillows, books, comics and hot chocolate.
5. Sobbing/Hiding in fear over the controller when playing video games.

I am super happy that spring is well on it's way! My skateboard has left the apartment and my cruising posture is starting to look pretty good... I think the snowboarding helped my skateboarding as much as my skateboarding helped my snowboarding! Hurray!

Onward to summer!

x AnneM

2016: New Year+

Happy new years everyone!

2015 was a pretty good year! I got a job that I love to bits, traveled a lot and learned how to skateboard! :^) It was also my first year in Bodø and I made some new friends!

This year I wanna focus on getting some more freelance work and start building better creative and healthy habits!

My New Years resolutions:

• Take more time out to sketch and finish a new 2016 sketchbook.
• Get one new member at Bodø D+D (Even if it's the last thing I'll do!)
• Work more efficiently– get up early!
• Do skillshare on sundays!

Thanks for looking!

xAnneM

Bodø Drink + Draw

I finally started the Bodø Drink + Draw FB group that I have been itching to do since I moved here. I don't have a lot of "drawing friends" in Bodø, so I really wanted to make some! My friend Anette moved here because of school, so now I had the opportunity to do a meet-up without having to do it alone. (Imagine me sitting alone with a tiny flag in a cafè for an hour and a half... such a sad mental image!)

If you are in the north of Norway and interested of joining when in Bodø, check out our facebook page! I even made a little logo for it! :^)

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

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

Life in the NORTH

Spring is here and summer is approaching!

Here is what I've been up to since Easter:

After visiting the plant nursery with my friend a couple of weekends ago, I got obsessed with the idea of planting some herbs for delicious pasta, rice and cous cous dishes... I suggested the idea to my BF and we went shopping with our neighbor and had a planting party!

My BF insisted on planting some sunflowers, since they are his favorite. They are growing strong and I'm hoping that I will get to see them bloom this year! (I don't know anything about sunflowers- How long does it take for them to bloom?)

Additionally, I have finally assembled my mini comic I did last year into a zine. It's a standard 8-fold with a poster on the back, making it A6 when folded together! I'm thinking about bringing it to Galleria this year and sell it since my friend owns one of the galleries that are being used in the festival and I get to display for free...!

I have yet to make many plans for summer except a vague thought about going to Oslo to hang out with my drink-and-draw (online) buddies and do nude model drawing at their local hang out, Blank Space. I don't have much money to spend this summer so I will probably stay in-country and mooch off my friends as much as possible by sleeping on floors...first place I'm heading is to is the Galleria show in Mosjøen! I'm glad my friends are so nice! :^D

Main goals this summer:

1. Hang out with friends.

2. Do some comics.

3. Learn how to use my new skateboard a little better than to wobbly ride down the street. 

Thanks for looking!

xAnneM

Easter!

God Påske!

This easter I sent the bf off to Lofoten to go down-hill skiing and, since I don't own skis, I was perfectly happy to spend my easter with my mom and cat in the city. :^)

There was grandiose plans about working on projects this holiday, but most was spent cuddling the cat, playing board games with friends and hanging out! Ah well! It was relaxing and nice, so I won't complain!

xAnneM

Merry Christmas ☆ Happy New Year!

Me and my dapper assistant wishes everyone a merry Christmas and a happy new year! Let's do our best to make this year even better than the last!

Oslo

I've been busy-busy with projects!
Last weekend I visited a friend in Oslo to celebrate her birthday- luckily there is a direct flight from my city to the capital, so sitting on a train for 12+ hours wasn't needed... hurray!♥

The birthday-party was a blast and we didn't even make it outside of the apartment because of all the excitement! Thanks for a great party! :^) Invite me next year too!!

On Sunday we had a lazy day consisting of eating great Vietnamese food, drinking bubble-tea and doodling. In the car ride to the restaurant I saw this guy carrying his dog on his shoulder like a parrot!

A+ weekend.