Embroid this!

 Spring is here, and with that I wanted to rejuvenate my pair of red jeans.

Some time ago I accidently got remnants of strong glue on my pants, that were IMPOSSIBLE to get of. Even tried to dye it red again, but no. So I finally felt inspired by this shift to warmer weather and got hold of some embroidery threads. I wanted to make som Wild Pansy's, since those are one of my favourite flowers. Not as neatly as Kaketsugi (invisible mending), or geometric like Sashiko but still in the realms of japanese wabi sabi philosophy. I wanted to make something new from an old accident.

The picture on the left was taken after I made the first two flowers, and you can see the kind of stains that I was trying to hide marked with red circles. Image on the right shows the flower added after the first picture.

Four stains = four flowers, and now the work is done.

Just for fun here is two of the pictures I used as an reference.

Have a great springtime! :-)

My sketchbook.

 I thought I would share from my sketchbook. I usually carry it in my inner pocet along with a brush-pen from Uni. If th mood is right and the music is tight, I might start to draw. One thing that have pushed me since december, is the idiom that say's "no thing is too small". I seek comfort in that idea, to just start anything without the need of a grand plan.

The first one on the left is what I made one morning on the train, the other one was on a plane.

Some sketches I just want to see in color. So for this drawing of a landscape I created a wall of flowers, to fill in the different shapes in the terrain.

Using all of my colored pencils.

 Hi.

I've had this huge sheet of paper stretched over my desk for about a month now. It's there to experiment with when I got any spare time. So he drawing will organically grow into whatever I feel like, and to get instant gratification, I wanted to make my whole collection of colored pencils available. 

This is how it started.

After a week I made some progress. But like always I wished I had done more.

Now I'm kinda stuck with this line right here. I don't know what to do with it. 

One of my struggles has always been that I start a project with an overly complicated idea. Often so grand of an idea that the projects stops after a few tries because I get stuck somewhere and I need an equally great idea to get past that point. So this experiment is meant to be a project where I just progress with whatever comes to mind. A place where I try to expand my drawing naturally and dampen my internal criticism. 

So this line will soon make sense in the grand sceme of things. The next update will hopefully show a lot more. 

2025 almost finished, and so is this drawing... Maybe.

 I hope you all have had a nice 2025, despite everything.

I'll leave you with this, the almost finished drawing from my august update. The coloring is complete, but I now wonder if I should add some highlights and shadows. Just to flash the already flashy, psychedelic aesthetics. 

Also, I hope you will stick around for 2026. Next year I'll keep up this blog with more sketches, ideas and behind the scenes shenanigans. 

Wish you a happy new year!

This is my final selection so far.

But these are the ones where i used Ctrl+U in Photoshop to get different colors. 

Collage-workshop.

 So I went to a collage-workshop held by illustrator and designer Tine Isachsen at the norwegian national museum. We drew with acrylic markers, watercolor markers, regular water colors and fineliners. It was a great experience where you had to make your own collage images, then cut them out and place it all together. Here's my result.

20-year anniversary!

 Just a little post to celebrate my 20-year anniversary as a small company.

I founded MexDesign in August of 2005, just so I could write graffiti and also write invoices. 

Later someone called me about the name and wondered if I could change it, because they wanted to use this .com domain. So I changed it to Artalamex. In case you didn't know, my nickname was Mex. I don't know why :-).

Trippin Water Colours.

What better way to spend the time on a trip to a cabin in the norwegian nature, than to explore the possibilities of a compact set of water colours.

Here's most of the media I used. A compact set of Winsor & Newton Water Colours and a Derwent set of 36 different water colour-pencils. 

First a wet the sheets and when they where semi-dry I fixed them to a plate with masking tape on the edges. Then I just went to town. A clue painting with water colours is to start with the lightest colours like yellow and then go darker and darker. The amount of water also determines the light-level of the colours.

I thought it would be interesing to see if I can combine water colours with pens and markers. I wondered how I could isolate the fields of colour with a black outline. By designing an outline wich can vary in size makes it organic, and I can also hide a fuzzy transition between two colours. Win and win again.

Next image i had the idea of isolated groups of colour in my mind from the start, and started to design shapes in an environment with more or less depth. Maybe the horizontal line helped to sell the idea of perspective?

I slightly added some extra shadows with the set of water colour-pencils when the paint was dry. Then I toned them out with a watered brush afterwards.

Some linework here as well. Used slimmer lines here.

You know, when you first have started you just have to see it through. This was becoming an assignement in steady handwork :-).

Next up, a more flowy, wavy vibe. 

So naturally I was compelled to do a more wavy, flowy linework here.

And here's the finished results:

Until next time folks.