small paintings

Hello friends,

I hope you’re doing well as the holidays approach. Personally, I’m ready to wind down, relax, and bring 2024 to a close—it’s been such a busy year! Lately, I’ve been watching a cozy show each day: The Great British Bake-Off. Up next is the new season of Queer Eye. I’m also looking forward to setting intentions for the new year. What can I say, I just love making plans. How about you? Do you have any special intentions for next year?

It’s been so dark here lately that traditional painting has become a real challenge—daylight lamps are just not the same. As a result, I’ve been spending more time working in Procreate. It’s probably my favorite way to paint, thanks to how light and portable it is. My ultimate goal is to use it for large, detailed pieces and eventually move away from Photoshop entirely.

Recently, after finishing my perspective guide, I decided to dive into a fun new project. As you might know, I love reading. I go through a lot of books and often jot down quotes and phrases that resonate with me. These aren’t always tied to the main plot; they’re usually short descriptions or observations that stand out. So far, I’ve just been collecting these in a document without doing much with them. However, they’re so evocative that they spark vivid images in my mind, and I find them incredibly inspiring for creating small sequential pieces. It’s a refreshing way to explore storytelling in a more abstract form and to revisit the idea of painting series—a concept I experimented with a few years ago in my Seaside and Children of the Sky illustrations.

The first quote is from Life Ceremony by Sayaka Murata: "his eyes were shaped like small leaves" (I read the book in German, so the precise wording was "seine Augen hatten die Form kleiner Blätter").

I'm not sure how many of these I'll create, but working on them has been so enjoyable—finding ideas, drawing on my iPad, choosing the font, all of it. I especially love the softness and simplicity of the paintings.

 And here's another quick painting I made: