Moo Holiday Card Competition

I´m a great Moo fan. They´ve got new stuff available and now they started holiday card competition.



Make a MOO Greetings Card with this image and help raise money for Médecins Sans Frontières. Click on the link and you'll be taken straight to a page on MOO with my image selected, ready for you to customise and buy.
Or find out more about the MOO Greetings Cards.

Happy Day!

What a great day yesterday. The ordered book "A Lifetime of Secrets: A PostSecret Book" by Frank Warren finally came. I read about half of the pages so far and it feels as if I´m holding a treasure in my hands.
And then a lady I got to know some weeks ago, just gave me her old bicycle. What a wonderful present! I´ve been wanting to have one for quite some time now. I offered to pay for it, but all she wants is to have a cup of coffee with me. Thanks, B.!



This is one of the pics I took in Amsterdam. I like the pic and the text. It´s a good motto. ;) It´s a mirror in the "House of Bols". If you look carefully you can see me inside the letters. I´ll post some more journal pages and about the fun I had there, in the next few days.

Amsterdam - Day 3 (Part 1)

On the third day of my stay I used the 72-hours i amsterdam card. The Van Gogh Museum was too crowded, so I just walked on to the Jewish Historical Museum. Wonderful and interesting! And I was pretty lucky with the special exhibitions they had there at the moment.


The museum is housed in four synagogues. Each synagoge shows a different part of the museum. There was an exhibit which reminded me of my husband: A hat with a hat box and a little hammer. Any body who knows what it is used for?

One exhibition showed works by Charlotte Salomon, titled "Work in Progress". On display were the reverse sides as well as individual sketches which she made for her series of over eight hundred gouaches, "Life? or Theater?". Charlotte Salomon (1917-1943) painted these remarkable gouaches to tell her life story.


Charlotte presumably considered the pieces that were on show unsuitable to include in her series. The sheets were unnumbered, and in some cases she concealed the person’s face, by sticking something over it. The exhibition offered an intimate insight into Charlotte’s sense of humour and her sensitivity.

The second exhibition showed "Sarah Bernhardt: The Art of High Drama" about the first international super star. Sarah Bernhardt´s name became synonymous with acting and continued to cast a spell on players and audiences throughout the world long after her death. She was the first stage actress to appear in films.

Amsterdam - Day 2 (Part 2)

Houseboat:

3-D letters at the Museumplein behind the Rijksmuseum:

House along the Grachts:

I found a little bottle of ink and I was inspired by Stefan G. Bucher´s Daily Monster to this (I made two more in the journal):

Amsterdam - Day 2 (Part 1)

NEMO is a famous science center right next to the Central Station in Amsterdam. The word NEMO means "nobody". Inside the NEMO visitors believe themselves to be in no man’s land, where fantasies seem to become real. The building resembles a giant green boat.

The I amsterdam Card is great for visitors who plan to see some tourist attractions. It is also for public transportation and restaurants. I liked the two canal rides most of all the free offers.

Van Gogh Museum. I drew it way too dark. Have a better look here:

The only thing at the Van Gogh Museum which you didn´t have to stand in line for, was this staircase. It is beautiful and all black and white.

I was surprised by some of Van Gogh´s pictures and motifs. Check this one out.

Amsterdam Moleskine Journal

Finally I managed to scan in some pics of the Amsterdam Moleskine journal I filled with sketches and some text. The pics I´m showing here do not have the same succession as in the journal and sometimes I just drew on any empty page (which I felt was the right one). So the posts here do not show the exact chronology.

Here´s the first page of the journal (The last one is similar.) :

The hotel (Thorbecke hotel) I stayed at:

The surroundings of the hotel with a lot of sights and places to visit (Rembrandtplein, Thorbeckeplein, etc.):

After Amsterdam

The wound has healed. Now that the scabs have all fallen off I can see some parts of the tattoo where corrections have to be done. But I´m happy with it. You can´t imagine how happy I was when I came out of the Tattoo Studio. I could have hugged the whole world.






I had the tattoo done by Tim at the House of Tattoos in Amsterdam.



The third tattoo is going to be... Shhh! I´m not telling you that. And I guess there won´t be any pics for that one. ;)

In Amsterdam

Before Amsterdam

The trip to Amsterdam was great. I just need to find the time to complete and scan my sketch book and then I´ll post about my stay there.

Mim told me that she was hoping (1) I could relax and have fun and (2) stay out of trouble and (3) bring back some great images.
Her wish was my command. Everything fullfilled... well, at least I have some great pictures I took with my camera.

Before Amsterdam:

The Pirate Is Back ... (The Portrait Party 5)

... with lots of treasures. ;)

I came back from Amsterdam yesterday late at night. It was a great and relaxing stay - well except for the last night (but that´s another story). Today morning I drove to my mom´s place to get the kids and there is a lot to be done here. And we´ll be having guests this and next week and I have quite some portraits to complete the next week. So I´ll let you know later about my experiences and the tons of souvenirs from Amsterdam.

Damien Weighill from London sent me this wonderful pirate portrait. I love the beard and the treasure and the eye flap and the hair and the blouse and ... I could go on ...
In case you want your portrait done by him just send him a pic of yours. He plans to do all requests. He´s a little camera-shy so he doesn´t exchange portraits, but he did start a competition where he wanted people to draw him how they imagined him to look like. I think he looks like a skater-kind of guy, but when I drew him he turned out way too well-behaved and ordinary-looking. I´m sure he doesn´t look like this.

Is this Damien Weighill? BTW: He also likes to fulfill wishes.

Amsterdam, I´m coming!

I´m off to Sin City... errrr ... Amsterdam in 2 hours. I´m already very excited and should better get some sleep now.





I hope I don´t end up like this:



(ATCs I made for the "Favorite Movie swap")

I guess I won´t be online the next eight days. So I´ll answer all the emails and portrait party requests during the last week of August.

Amsterdam

When I travel alone, I spend the whole day walking around. Usually I don´t do too many museums (except for last year in Madrid with tons of Picasso exhibitions). I prefer people watching. Walking and watching all day makes me tired, so I sleep a lot too. And I really do need some rest.


(ATC done for the "Favorite Artist Swap" - Dorian Cleavenger)
So here are some of the places I would like to visit in Amsterdam:

• Torture museum - I´m not really interested, but my friend said I would like it ;)
  
• Max Beckmann exhibition at the Van Gogh Museum
• Stedelijk museum
  
• Street markets
• Abraxas Too (famous coffee shop formerly known as Chocolata) - (Don´t worry I don´t like smoking, so I won´t be trying out all the stuff they have there.)

My obligatory to-do list:

• Lambiek comic store
• sleep and rest
• Fill my new Moleskine with sketches
  
• Tuschinski cinema (famous art deco movie theater)

Any ideas what else I should do when staying in Amsterdam? Suggestions are always welcomed!

Amsterdam

Woo hoo! I finally booked a flight and hotel for a week in Amsterdam. I hadn´t realized that the city would be that expensive during the summer vacation (also due to my late booking). An extensive search with our travel agent lead to expensive hotels rather far from the city center.
So I cut back on my wishes and booked everything by myself on the internet.



This will be my hotel for 8 days... tiny, perfectly situated in the centre of the red light district, close to everything and full of life.
The hotel has been rated as "pretttty dodgy", "rather depressing" and "dreadful". The club in the basement seems to be "EXTREMLY loud" till 5 am!
I´m only hoping that the shared shower and toilet are clean. But otherwise I´m pretty happy to have found an affordable accomodation right in the center of Amsterdam. See you there!

BTW: Zurich won the votes, but only by 26%. I was already looking for a place to stay there, but then decided that Zurich is a city where I am quite often anyway. So the Giger Museum still has to wait for a little while.

Where shall I spend my next vacation? (Poll)

I frequently used to go on vacation by myself until I met my husband, married and had kids. Last year I went on vacation alone, for the first time after 7 years and I enjoyed that so much. It is wonderful to have the power of decision for a few days.
So I decided that I will get myself some time off the family once a year on a regular basis.

This year I´m not sure where I should go to. If you have any recommendations let me know and take a second to vote at the poll on the right side please.
These are a few cities I would like to visit:

• Amsterdam (I love the city and the grachts, and so far I have been there 3 times, but always only for a day or two. I remember one time when all of us slept in one Fiat Punto throughout our visit. That´s pretty small room for 5 persons!)
  
• Madrid (There are still a lot of (Picasso related ) places I still haven´t seen there)
  
• Paris (I love the city, the food, the wine, the cafés, ...)
• Zurich (I would love to visit the Giger Museum in Gruyère)
• Valencia (Another beautiful Spanish city - not that I want to visit the food fight festival La Tomatina).
  
• Kassel ( I want to visit the Documenta - no chance to do that with the kids, but spending 7 or 8 days in Kassel??)
  
• Los Angeles (My favorite city originally named "El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río de Porciúncula" - "The Town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels on the River Porciúncula" - but I guess way too expensive for this short trip)
  
• Other city (Any ideas? I love to visit new places)

So far I think Amsterdam is on my plan.

Last year I spent 9 days in Madrid, Spain and it was beautiful. I was specially lucky as Spain commemorated an overlap of Picasso-related anniversaries — from that of his birth 125 years ago to the 25th anniversary of the arrival of "Guernica" in a democratic Spain as stipulated in the artist's will. I couldn´t even have a look at all the Picasso events and exhibitions during my stay, but I enjoyed the larger ones.