That being said, of course I will choose pictures taken with my “real” camera over my iphone any day. So while I am working on getting better at taking pictures of our family, I will at least stick to my goal of showing you 1 portrait a month of Sophie. And in line with the wish of having more everyday pictures, I have made a story board of Sophie where I have tried to capture some of her real expressions. And as the person who knows her best in the entire world, I think I did a pretty good job

I can make story boards from sessions too, but then you have to ask for it

If you like my pictures, I would love it if you liked my Facebook-page!

On that note, we are still doing quite a bit of sightseeing, but most of it is done by car, haha. We have been to Dubai a couple of times, it feels SO great to be able to drive there in our own car, not having to spend two hours on a Chinese train carrying everything you buy with you etcetc. Dubai is a lot bigger than Abu Dhabi and thus far I must say I prefer Abu Dhabi, although Dubai has some fantastic shopping malls, and it felt super exotic to drive all the way out the palm. Some day we are staying at the Atlantis (the hotel that is furthest out on the palm island), they have doplphin swimming IN the hotel, together with a whole lot of other activities. We went for a brief visit, it seemed a bit like a Las Vegas hotel (withouth the gambling and the boozing of course), but great fun to see!

Next trip we are doing is definetely going to be to the desert, hopefully within a few of weeks There I am most definetely bringing my camera!

Anyway, while I am waiting for cooler weather and outdoor photo shoots, instead of spending all my money in the shopping malls (which I could easily do, they have SO much nice stuff here!!), I have been making a few more things I think  I will hang in Sophie’s room. I know they are a little bit over the top cutesie, but for a kids’ room I think that is allowed… Not sure if I will print both though, lets see.. The second one with the bird is kind of my favorite. Anyway. Will be back soon with pictures I hope

In the meantime I am posting a couple of pictures that I have shown before, the difference being that I have now added some texture to the pictures, to make them look more like “paintings”. I intend to print them on mat paper, or even better on a canvas (don’t know where to do that here…), and replace the ones I already have. Still working on things to hang on my wall, apparently we will have plenty of white wall to hang things in our new home in Abu Dhabi, and I think that there is nothing like your own pictures hanging on your wall to make it feel a little bit like “home”, even if it isn’t.

In light of my love for travel I made another little thing for my wall. I see plenty of variations of these on Pinterest, so I guess I am not being very original, but at least it is kind of nice that it is homemade… And coincidentally the base color is light blue which is my favorite color at the moment, again, it must be the grey weather here that inspires my choice of colors!

The print 9X9 inches, so not too big, but nicely fitting in a white Ikea-frame. I am collecting things to hang at the moment, as we just saw the first pics of our Abu Dhabi apartment, and there are a lot of empty, white walls! If you have any nice ideas, please share so I can make more stuff.

Anyway, after posting something similar to this the other day and saying I was happy about it I completely changed my mind, so then I had to remake it and post it again. Almost too cute maybe, but at least now the colors are much better than they were in my opinion. I still prefer to stick to few colors because there are so many elements in a picture like this, so too many colors make it way too busy.

This one is a family piece; for the bedroom maybe? This started out as an empty page, and the text that said “my 10 favorite things” and then I started adding things from there. I made all the pictures in this piece black and white in order to not have to many colours since I had so many elements and so many things, that would have been way to busy I think.

Another thing to think about when making things to hang on your wall, is the size of the picture. I have printed many a thing to frame and then tried to find matching frames with no luck. First of all I often go to Ikea for frames, they have nice and simple ones that I like and they are cheap. But the sizes of the frames are never ever matching the sizes they offer in the print shops. Am not sure if this is a Chinese thing, or and Ikea-thing. Either way it is annoying, as special framing is so much expensive, even here in China. So now I have started printing stuff at a special print store that can print in whatever size, and I make the sizes that fit with Ikea-frames. This one is 30X40 cm, and Ikea also has 50X50cm, and 9X9 inch, which is about 23 cm, a good size for a smaller, square picture. Ah, so many things to think about…

Also, with a picture like this you can make nice cards and other creative things, maybe a poem? (But probably something more creative than I came up with here…). Anyway, the only limit is your own imagination!

Flowers