For some time now, my painting teacher has been encouraging me to try oil paints. Since I started taking painting classes four years ago, I have exclusively painted with acrylic. Apart from some failed attempts in my youth, I have never done anything with oil paint.

In my youth, I was gifted a box set of Van Gogh oil paints for a series of drawings I created for my school (I painted with gouache back then). It was a lovely gesture, and I appreciated enormously this gift they gave me. Sadly, I didn’t have a painting teacher who could advise me, and YouTube didn’t exist yet. So I bought a book and tried it on my own. The book provided a wealth of information - too much information, in fact, for someone who knew nothing about it. It felt lost. I tried a few things, but didn’t use the right medium and techniques. It didn’t work out. I put the paints in a box and never touched them again.

Fast forward to 2025, when I’m at the end of my thirties. I’m not going to lie, the failed attempts in my youth trying out oil paint left a bad impression on me, that the medium was hard to use, that it wasn’t anything for me. It took me months of gentle encouragement from my teacher to finally give in and try it again. I searched for the old oil paints everywhere, but couldn’t find them. So I bought new ones (and then a week after my purchase, I found them again :) )

I decided to paint this portrait of Spanish Actress Natalia Sánchez (Begoña in Sueños de Libertad). It’s mostly painted wet in wet, ‘alla prima’, on a small canvas board. I painted without a medium, only with a bit of linseed oil.




I must say that this experience was very positive. I felt relaxed working on it. Thanks to the slow dry speed, you have more time to blend colors. The face was therefore a lot easier to get right. The hair, however, felt more challenging to do than acrylics. The fast drying speed of acrylics actually helps with hair, as you can wait till a layer is dry to add some individual hairs here and there.

I’m looking forward to doing another one of these. I set up a charcoal drawing on a larger canvas board to start painting on Monday in the painting course.

Three weeks for Dreamwidth: What book surprised you by turning out way better than you expected?

I already talked a bit about The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Kundera, which was a book that surprised me in various ways. However, the book I wish to pick in relation to this question is Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë.

This was a book that I read for a school assignment. We had a list of books to read, and I went to the library relatively late, so many other students had already picked the books I had marked on my paper and wanted to read. This book was the only one I could still find in the local library. I recall picking up the book from the shelf and reading the summary. I instantly disliked it. It was formulated like a typical love story, and at that time, the last thing I wanted to read was a (straight) romance book. But since I had no other option, I picked up the book and started reading it. Rather quickly, I was taken aback by the strength of this story, the rawness, the deep and obsessive love between unlikely lovers. I loved every moment of reading it. I think this book enflamed in me a bit of a passion for classics, as in the years to come, I read a good number of them, remembering this book and how something you think you might not be interested in might surprise you and enchant you.

Three weeks for Dreamwidth: Name three ships from three different fandoms that you like

Xena / Gabrielle (Xena: Warrior Princess)

The warrior and the bard. This is my original OTP, and will always have a place in my heart. They went through so much together, complemented each other in many ways, and loved each other deeply. It was canon that they were bound together always, even in different lifetimes, they would find each other again. The beauty of the show was also that you could see them as whatever you wanted them to be: deep friends, lovers, or something in between.

Sara Lance / Ava Sharpe (Legends of Tomorrow)

A reformed assassin and a clone from the future. One is impulsive, chaotic, and the other is ordered and strict. Their differences initially made them struggle to get along, but like in a classic ‘enemies-to-lovers’ trope, they quickly fell in love. They formed a powerful couple, taking the lead of a team of misfits to solve problems in the timeline. I always thought they fit very well together, their love story is powerfully written on the show, and is also the main couple.

Seven of Nine/ Raffi (Star Trek: Picard)

I loved them together, but I can’t deny that this was a bit of a mixed bag, due to their potential and how the show decided to deal with it. Both characters are powerful in their own right, but they are also damaged in some ways. The audio drama "No Man's Land” is actually one of the few instances where the couple is portrayed well, showcasing tender moments and moments of vulnerability in which they can heal together. The show itself was subpar in writing the couple. The viewer didn’t get to see them fall in love (only a hand-holding scene in S1 that implied they had fallen in love). In the second season, they are together but constantly bicker and argue. In the third season, they had broken up. So much more could have been done with them.

Three weeks for Dreamwidth: What was your favorite childhood book?

My favorite book as a child was the Dutch book ‘Eefje Donkerblauw’ (Little Eve Darkblue). It is a wonderful story with beautiful illustrations, and it’s about fascination for colors, and love. The book in essence, explains how color mixing works in the most adorable way.

Eefje loves dark blue, and everything in her life is dark blue. Teapots, chairs, bed,… Everything. Then, at a moment on the beach, she meets Koning Goudgeel (King Goldenyellow), who adores yellow. She becomes enchanted by him, and as her fascination for him grows, she starts to incorporate yellow into her life. She paints yellow flowers on her blue teapots, mixes bits of yellow in her clothing. When she meets the king again, he has done the same thing to his world, but then with blue. They fall in love and ultimately start a family. All of their children love green.

It is a charming tale, and apart from the color information, it also beautifully explains that loving someone and adding someone to your life also means adding pieces of her/him/them to your life, so your life becomes fuller and deeper.

This book, sadly isn’t translated into English to my knowledge

Three weeks for Dreamwidth: Which book(s) didn't you finish and why?

I generally always try to finish the novels I start reading. Sometimes it happens that there is a long gap between reading sessions, and I have to read back a bit. In the case of The Lord of the Rings, I even decided to reread the first 150 pages because it had been way too long.

I can remember two books that I actively decided not to finish. The first one was a Dutch book called Onderuniversum (Under Universe) by Pen Steward. The second one was Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving.

Onderuniversum is a sci-fi story set in Belgium and the Netherlands hundreds of years in the future. Everything here has become a desert, there have been ecological disasters, and the local world is made up of city-states. There, poor people live in houses built in the spaces where maritime canals used to be. I bought the book when I met the author at a stand at a local fantasy con. She told about her story, categorized it as ‘urban fantasy’ (which, in my opinion, it isn’t), and I was intrigued because the story took place (partly) in my country. I know not many sci-fi/fantasy novels are set in my country, and I definitely hadn’t read one. The book was young-adult, but I didn’t realize that until I started reading it and saw the category on the back of the book. I’m really unfamiliar with young adult books; I haven’t read many. This story just didn’t work for me for various reasons. I didn’t like the male protagonist; the world-building was, in my opinion, not well done. I also didn’t read like urban fantasy, and the desert setting meant that it had very few things left that were recognizable as Belgium or the Netherlands, except for city names. It could have taken place in any place, even a fictional universe. I decided to stop reading at 200 pages.

The second book, Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving, is well known and respected. I had read The World According to Garp years before and loved it, so I bought this book. It sat on my shelf for a few years until I got to read it. Remembering my fun with his other book, I expected to love this one, but I didn’t. I just couldn’t get into the writing; I disliked the style of writing, as well as the story. I wondered why I felt so different about this book, and I think this is probably a case of personal taste changing over years. I think it was possible that, had I read it after I read The World According to Garp, I could have appreciated this book. I gave up reading after a particular scene in the book that I thoroughly disliked for how he wrote it.

Three weeks for Dreamwidth: Which artists do you like or did influence you?

In my youth, I was enchanted by classic fantasy artists I found while being subscribed to a fantasy art newsgroup (Yes, it was long ago). I don’t remember all of their names, but I know the first art book I bought was one of the Hildebrandt brothers talking about their Tolkien Calendar that they did in the seventies. It was amazing. They talked about their process of painting scenes from The Lord of the Rings, using reference pictures in which their family members posed for sketches, which they made into paintings. It had the quality of fine art, but in the fantasy genre. I still have this book. It’s torn, and the pages are loose. But I still look through it from time to time.

It greatly influenced me, but sadly, I left creating fantasy art behind when I went to study art. It was frowned upon, and it was not ‘real art’. It was useless, they said. There was no market for it. I never lost the fascination. Larry Elmore, Frank Frazetta, Boris Vallejo & Julie Bell, Jesper Ejsing … I still look up to them a lot. Their work is fantastic.

Regarding traditional art, I love Breughel, Mucha, Egon Schiele, Edward Hopper, Aubrey Beardsley, Giorgio Morandi, Caspar David Friedrich, Mark Rothko. In comics, I love Grzegorz RosiÅ„ski’s art.

Since the end of last year, I’ve started making pencil drawings again. Quick things, mostly, at first. But then I started to make a few quick portraits of characters of the Spanish telenovella I was watching Sueños De Libertad. Now, drawing faces is something I've struggled with for quite some time. I became better at it when studying the Loomis method some time ago, but still. It was always a hit or miss. And so were the first fan portraits I made of these characters last year. However, I started doing them more regularly, and they became better. I decided to post them online in the fandom of this telenovela. The first ones were not particularly good, but I started getting better. I saw other fan artists doing weekly drawings, posted on Saturday or Sunday, and I decided to join in. For some three months now I’ve been making a weekly fan drawing. Today I finished and posted this one:




All the drawings are posted on Twitter as well as on my fan art Instagram account.

I usually search/make a screenshot I like of this couple and try to make a nice black and white pencil drawing of it. Doing this weekly for three months has permitted me to improve my pencil skills and given me an insight into how many hours a drawing like this takes to complete. Both are valuable. At the moment, I’m seeing this fan work as a place in which I can make decisions on how I want to improve/ grow. In that regard, I’d like to do two things. I’d like to try to make such portraits in acrylic. I’ve already done one in black and white last year, and it turned out well. Another way I wish to take this, is that I want to be able to construct scenes of my own with these characters, instead of only relying on a screenshot. I’ve seen fan artists do this. They construct a pose with a setting for a couple they like, then use corresponding pictures/screenshots of the character’s faces to be able to draw them with a good likeness. This takes considerable skill, and I’m going to have to practise and learn a lot to be able to do this.

Three weeks for Dreamwidth: Name three books (or book series) that had an impact on you

I’m going to answer that only considering fiction books, no non fiction.

Robin Hobb, Farseer series

I read these books in my youth, and I think this fantasy series got me into really enjoying reading. For school, we got these lists of books to read, and I often didn’t connect with those books, especially not the young adult books they advised us to read. They were frequently full of drama, and I already had a difficult situation to cope with at home, so I didn’t want to read things that were depressing as well.

I found this book series in a bookstore, read the description about a young man growing up in a castle full of intrigue, training to be an assassin, though he didn’t want to be one. He also had an extraordinary magical gift to communicate with animals. I hadn’t read any reviews on this series, but I really liked the description and bought the first book. I loved it, read the whole first trilogy. I saw there were (at the time) two more trilogies following this story, so I read them as well. I have very fond memories of this, staying up late to discover what was going to happen. I started reading other fantasy books after that, as well as classic seventies speculative fiction that my father had on his bookshelf and that he had read when he was young.

Terry Moore - Strangers in Paradise

This comic book series is about Katchoo, a young woman growing up and being in love with her best friend Francine - who keeps dating men who were mostly bad for her. It starts as just a fun growing-up tale, with plenty of humor, but it evolves further to incorporate aspects of the crime and thriller genres.

I read the book while in college, studying economics, but what I really wanted to do was to study art or take art courses. Katchoo grew up to be an artist, and the book showed me parts of a life I liked to have: learning about art and taking life drawing courses. Being an artist. She also was a badass, taking no shit from anyone. I admired her, wanted to be more like her in some ways. I loved reading about her, and I think this is one of the few books I reread years later. It was again a wonderful experience.

Milan Kundera - The Unbearable Lightness of Being

This was a mandatory read for a college course about literature. I remember being intimidated by the title. I thought this would be a tough book to read and connect with, but I was very wrong. It read really nicely, and told the story about two people who had an entirely different way of seeing life and about what life should be. One chooses security, planning everything out, wanting security, and for instance, a steady romantic relationship. These were things that other protagonists saw as ‘heavy’, as she wanted a life that was light and free of responsibilities, taking everything one day at a time, and just having fleeting flings with people. The ultimate question this book raises is, what kind of life is ‘light’ and ‘heavy’; and I find myself often thinking back to how the novel dealt with these questions, frequently posing myself the same ones as I go through life. Not many books linger in my mind like that.

Three weeks for Dreamwidth: What was the first website/blog/... you had on the internet?

I think the first website (or page I had on a website) was on Elfwood, way back in the early 2000's. As far as I remember, you could post your fantasy art there (on the wiki it said it also featured scifi art but I don't remember that very clearly), fanart and also stories you've written. It had a page dedicated to tutorials, and it had a community part too, in the form of Elftown, where you could have a profile with your interests and send messages to other users. Strangely enough, while Elfwood ceased to exist years ago, Elftown still exists on the web. I have no idea if it still has active users however.

On Elfwood I had a page that was mostly filled with my early attempts at digital art in Photoshop and Corel Painter. I also had a few fanart drawings on it.

While I appreciate Elfwood for offering me a place for my fantasy art, I remember it was also notorious for it strict modding system. Every time you wanted to post an image, you had to send in a ticket with your drawing. Mods then decided if it was good enough to post (if it wasn't fantasy/scifi enough for their liking, for instance, you weren't allowed to post it). I remember that I had fanart rejected because I used a photo reference to draw it, and they saw that. The latter made me quit the site, as I found it an absurd reason to reject fan art.

Three weeks for Dreamwidth: What are you currently reading?

I’m reading a novel and three fanfiction stories, one of which is finished and the other two are still ongoing.

* The book I’m reading is Winterwode by J. Tullos Hennig. It’s the third book in her series of books of the Wode, which currently consists of five books. The books tell (or retell) the story of Robin Hood, as he comes of age, discovers he’s a main part of the old pagan religion and has adventures as he gets older. In the books, some of the things we come to expect from a Robin Hood tale are changed somewhat. Robin is a gay man who falls in love with the son of a Christian nobleman. Maid Marian is Robin’s sister.

I was initionally drawn to the books thanks to it being a reimagining of Robin Hood with a queer perspective, and I can say the books are really wonderful. There’s a lot happening, a clash between the old pagan religion and the then-new Christian faith that is rapidly spreading. There’s a lot of adventure and intrigue, a lot of companionship (Robin’s merry men form a great lot of friends). There’s history in it, with the crusades going strong and the Knights Templar coming into play. There is magic in it, in a way that the stories read as something between fantasy and magic realism. I greatly recommend the book series.

* The main fanfiction story (the one that is finished) that I’m reading is the Spanish 1983 by Lookupthestars_ on Wattpad. It is a Marta & Fina fanfiction story from Sueños de Libertad, but it is set in a new timeframe (modern day) with a different setting. A young female reporter/ photographer, by chance, discovers a box full of beautiful black and white photographs by an unknown author who recently passed away. In awe of this find, she becomes intrigued with wanting to know more about this photographer and her life, and starts looking for clues in the photographs to learn more about the identity of this photographer. One thing she quickly discovers is that one woman is photographed multiple times over the course of years. She becomes fascinated by this woman in the pictures and searches for her identity, wanting to meet her and show her the pictures.

This story is a sapphic romance story, and it is beautifully written. Its quality is on par and sometimes even better than the published romance stories I read. I highly recommend this story to anyone who is a fan of sapphic romance (and knows Spanish, since it’s written in Spanish), even if you’re not familiar with the TV show. No previous knowledge of anything is required to read it; it just reads like an excellent book. Anyone who wants to check it out can find it HERE.