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

Illustrated wallpaper!

Late last year I got an amazing assignment from bossman: I was to create a sketch for an illustrated wallpaper for a health clinic for pregnant women and young people in the center of the city. They wanted something pattern-y and colorful with a turquoise background to match the walls, so I sketched some simple and different people and nature to make the whole pattern into a park... just like the one we have available here in our city! The job was on hold through Christmas, but now it's finished...!

I wanted all the people and animals to have friendly, wavy forms and odd, but cute looking anatomy- which I think I managed pretty well! The illustration elements are separate and pretty large so they can be used for promotional things for the clinic! I love when stuff can be "re-used" for different marketing products.

I had a lot of fun with this job and I think the results show this! Here is an image (sorry for the low quality) from the finished wallpaper... I can't get over how cool it is to have my illustrations on a wall for people too see! :^)

Thanks for looking!

xAnneM

SB016

Recent sketches! For some reason this past month has been really busy..! I want to make more time to do draw!

2016: Skillshare Sundays

I've been doing Skillshare Sundays, though on Coursera, which makes the name Skillshare Sunday kinda odd, but we'll run with it.

The course I've been taking these few weeks is a basic course on HTML, CSS and Javascript in responsive webdesign. I knew about 99% of everything in the HTML and CSS sections of the course, so I was pretty excited for Javascript, which I don't have that much experience with. The Javascript part was, of course, pretty basic, but surprisingly difficult! They move quickly through subjects, and I should definitively have taken extra time to read up on the stuff they were discussing. In the end I did OK and I feel I have a little more knowledge stuffed in my brain.

The "exam" was making a quick and dirty webpage with some javascript in it...which prompted me to make a page for my fictional cat. It looks terrible and I would rather set fire to it than show it here. Yeah.

Course verdict:
Timidly recommended?
If you are looking for a refresher after a hiatus from web site coding, this is a nice course to ease you into it. If you're looking to get into website coding and don't know where to start, this should help you on your way...tho you will have to do some outside reading to make sense of the quick pace. It isn't very friendly to people who have no coding experience at all and assumes that you know a thing or two beforehand. The course videos are well made, though the teachers move super fast though all the subjects with a lot of technical terms. If you aren't a fluent english speaker, the tests might be a little advanced and confusing. I had trouble with understanding some of the questions because I mixed up the terminology and the questions were sometimes a little outside of what we had learned that week.

In the end, it's a well made course that if you spend a little extra time on it will give you a good push into responsive website design.

You can find the course here.

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+ For your enjoyment I made an illustration for this post.

Text is boring! Illustration is the best!

Thanks for looking!

xAnneM

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

FINISHED SKETCHBOOK PARTY AT MY HOUSE!!

I started my ASDA sketchbook when I was in Manchester in 2014 during the summer and have been drawing in it on-and-off. It's a little bit smaller than A4 and the paper is not too thick, so it feels really nice to draw in with pencil and micropens (prismas bleed through tho!). I really wanted to keep it a 2014/2015 sketchbook, so I hiked up my drawing-pants this past month to finish it and now... it's finished! :^D

I don't think I've finished a sketchbook completely (I do have some which are close to finished) until now, tho not for the lack of trying. I keep buying new ones because new sketchbooks are seriously the best and if I find a nice sketchbook I gotta have it... but since my sketches are divided on digital and by hand, they just don't get filled in that fast.

Here are some sketches from it!
Taken by phone and edited in PS, so the ones that came out looking OK were the ink sketches and some of the stand-alone doodles...no bakgrounds! I guess they will remain a mystery in my sketchbook until I buy a scanner.

Super excited to start my 2016 sketchbook! It has slightly thicker and texturized paper... saving my last ASDA sketchbook for 2017! I will try my best to finish it too! (I will need more stickers for the outside...)

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! :^)