In this blog post I´ll be sharing some  recent sketches that I made. You can see them below this post. In the meantime some thoughts on my online presence : I'm still thinking about what  I want to do with the layout of my website and it will probaly be undergoing many minor changes in the future. I have asked advice  from fellow artist friends on the publishing of portfolio's and personal work. I want to include my most beloved pieces of personal work. So from now on, the Gallery will serve as a living page where I'll store my favored sketches and other pieces. The home page will serve as as landing / portfolio page, which is obviously due for a major overhaul. Expect many changes there the new year!

Lately I haven't been studying much, but instead I have been focussing on just making personal work and putting my knowledge into practice. I have some ideas for upcoming pieces and I'm still thinking about a potential project that involves Dutch landscapes. At the moment there are many individual dots that I need to connect. I believe that 2016 will force me to shift into a higher gear. I expect next year will be difficult, but for all the right reasons. I think I'm heading for a rough time but I believe I will emerge stronger once it's behind me.

I wasn't planning on writing a big blog post to summarize the end of 2015, but looks like that's where it's heading! I'll sign off for now and come back later to touch on some subjects from this year.

-Michiel

This is a recurring problem in my work. It shouldn't be just about the background, even though that's what I love to paint. My work lacks storytelling!

I found a brilliant photograph of some clouds at sunset and just had to make a study of it. This is, ofcourse, a cropped version of it. I focussed on the colors and overal mood and tried to simplify the shapes. It took me just over an hour and I tried to keep in mind the many lessons I learned in order to keep things simple and straightforward. I'm pleased with the end result and really enjoyed myself :)

Making thumbnails is a great way to explore an existing idea in your head. It allows you to focus on the essence of the idea and how you're going to portray it. Another benefit of making thumbnails, for me personally, is starting without any idea what I want to make. This allows me to push shapes and ideas around that come up during painting, without any restrictions on what I want to make at that moment. This leads to ever changing and transforming thumbnails that can inspire me or lead to happy accidents.

Below are some thumbs I made by just winging it. I like some of them but they may seem a bit too detailed or defined to be called just thumbnails. This is because I often get caught up in a thumbnail and try to push it further and further until I'm happy with it. Sometimes it's hard for me to leave it alone until it's just right and that's when I realise it's becoming a value sketch instead of just a thumbnail.

However, I think this is because I like where that thumbnail was going and what idea resides within it. The important thing to remember about thumbnails is that you can never have too many of them! :)

This week I learned something important about practicing. Often I would sketch, study or doodle something and then refrain from showing it to people. I would worry that it dind't look good.

But it's not supposed to look perfect. or very good. I realised that practice is more about learning than making a pretty picture. If I wanted to make something perfect, I would construct an image with all the knowledge and tools I have at my disposal.

Now, I just started doodling and trying out new brushes ( Thanks to Noah Bradley for sharing his brush presets ) and came back the next day to tinker on the values and textures a bit more.

Even though I'm not happy with many things in this picture, I wanted to show it because there are things that I do like; the range of values, some textures in the rocks and background and the composition. And more importantly, I still enjoy coming back to a sketch and realised that failing isn't so bad, just as long as you learned something from it.