Coloring Book!
Hello everyone!
It is with great joy that I can finally announce that I have been working on a coloring book over the last year!
So many of you asked for one when I started to dive into ink drawings and watercolors and it’s been a dream of mine ever since.
So when EMF edition came to me, I immediately said yes.
Well… not immediately, as I wanted to make sure I could do whatever drawings and topics I wanted, especially post apocalyptic and growth on trash, for which they happily agreed, fully aware of my work.
Delays
The project itself was signed and started last year, however it had a bit of delay.
Last year, because of my solo show, which took all of my time and I had none left for such a gigantic endeavour. And earlier in 2023, I was diagnosed with neuralgia on my dominant arm, which forced me to stop working for almost a month.
Turns out it was a mixture of bad posture (I have now an inclined drawing table) stress and over-working. I cancelled almost all group shows I was in for the first half of 2023 and religiously did yoga twice a day. In my case it’s the spine that needs some extra love and care.
I am happy to tell you that I am now back to normal and my arm is all good again (luckily!) and EMF were super kind and gave me more months to work on the book.
The Drawings
It was very important to me to make every drawing a proper artwork, which will eventually become a painting.
I can tell you, it is a massive amount of work as every drawing is an original and new one, I probably could have recycled older artworks of mine, but I wanted to draw to scale, so I would make the details at the right size.
All the portrait drawings come with a focus on one animal, plant, fungi or mineral to make the whole book a tat scientific. I personally love to learn about the nature that is around me, but I’m also very slow at it because I have to search online for every thing I encounter.
There is so much loss of knowledge of the immediate natural world that surround us, and I hope this will inspire you to learn.
That being said, a lot of the focus animals are absolutely not local to where I live, it’s often beings I’ve encountered in my travels or that I found interesting in some ways.
An example of a double page, on the right the intricate detailed drawing, on the left a focus on a rare butterfly that I saw in a museum in Australia, my entomologist friend helped me identify this one.
Tutorial
With the coloring book also comes a full chapter of how to color with colored pencils. So it’s an added help to get the most out of the coloring book. That being said, it still is just a coloring book, so don’t be too precious about it, coloring is about meditation and fun and the result shouldn’t really be the main goal, just an added bonus.
Release Date
The release date is on November 28th of this year, you can already find the book on amazon.de and it should be available worldwide once released.
For now, it’s in German, but depending on how it does it might get translated. It’s not much of an issue for the coloring part of course, but it might be for the tutorial part.
Special thanks to Hahnemühle for sending me their 100% cotton paper, Caran d’Ache for their whole collection of Luminance and of course EMF Verlag for the project and support!
I would like to add that I already use Luminance colored pencils only and that’s why I asked for a collaboration with them. I have tried Hahnemühle before and I know their papers are great. I never work with brands I don’t buy myself. So just wanted to point that out.