Viktoria Night Art

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Nederland
Amsterdam
Viktoria Night Art

Artist in Amsterdam - watercolors, prints, urban sketching, digital art, portraits, commissions

07/04/2026

Last winter someone organized a sketch meetup to the newly opened Nederlandse Bank building in the middle of Amsterdam.

It used to be like Fort Knox, where all the Dutch gold was kept in the basement. Since then they have relocated the gold to a more secure location. Now common folk are allowed to take a gander inside the building and see the impressive vaults.

There is also a cafe upstairs that is supposed to be open to the public, but it wasn’t open at the time of our meet up. It might be worth organizing another trip back to this place to check it out. 🤔

Since we were stuck downstairs and it was very cold outside there wasn’t that much to sketch, so I sketched this newly planted tree. It was on top of some newly planted dirt. Everything had just been newly renovated inside, also the landscaping. It would be interesting to see what the garden area looks like now after its humble beginnings.

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01/04/2026

Whales are extraordinary creatures. They’re the largest mammals on Earth 🌏 but they can also… fly!

23/01/2026

Yesterday was the last day of my daughter‘s crochet class and I was waiting inside for her due to the cold weather.

I was struggling for something “interesting”to sketch, when I sort of relaxed my eyes and noticed that even in the cold gray weather there are still green trees and colorful party “slingers” leftover from a past birthday party.

Drawing all of the remaining grey parts with a purple fineliner cheered me up the rest of the way.

I was happy that with some patience I could turn a “boring” scene into something fun to sketch. 😊

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23/12/2025

In the spring I went sketching with the Amsterdam Urban Sketchers at De Duif church. This place has special significance to me since it’s where I got married 13 years ago. 👰🏻

Due to lack of space I’ve been working with watercolors for the last few years. I miss painting with oils, so I tried painting one of the stained glass windows with the oil painting brush in the Art Rage app on my iPad. It kind of sort of worked, but it wasn’t the same as squishing around lush oil paints around the canvas.

The experience was still pretty awesome, since we were treated to a few performances while we were drawing together. That’s just one of the great aspects of sketching in such an art rich city.

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28/11/2025

This week is the opening of the amsterdam light festival. It has been one of my dreams to exhibit in this light festival. I’ve been submitting proposals for years but they are always passed over.

This time it took a few months before my proposal was rejected, instead of the usual rejection time of a few weeks. So I guess I’m failing better? 😆

I think my lack of architectural training might be a detriment in the selection process. I tend to want to build artworks that boats go under. I can guess that those can be tricky to build, and potentially dangerous if a boat runs into the sculpture, or some yahoo decides to climb on top of the sculpture from the side of the canal? So next year I’ll be thinking more about making freestanding sculptures instead.

But at any rate, here was this year’s submitted concept:

We’re living in a time where we see more and more how we are all connected and how all of our actions affect each other around the world.

I would like to build tubes of light that criss cross each other and go over the canals. They will relay ‘messages’ and phenomena back and forth between each other. The messages would reverberate between different tubes, so viewers could see how seemingly separate entities are all repeating back the same light message. Whenever we perceive things to be separate, we see they’re actually connected.

The messages will consist of different light patterns that will travel across the tubes from one end to the other, using short bursts of light and longer bursts of light.

We could also mix in morse code patterns using longer and shorter bursts of light. For example, this is the Morse Code for “I Love You”
. .-.. — ...- . -.— — ..-

Messages like this have been passed back and forth since ancient times. Even if someone doesn’t read Morse Code they might be able to feel the spirit of the message because messages such as this are built into our collective human memory.

23/11/2025

I’ve seen other urban sketching groups organize meet ups in IKEA and I thought it was a brilliant idea. Unfortunately there were a lot of people marked “interested”in the event on facebook, but only a handful of people actually showed up.

It was OK though, because the people who came were super nice. We had a lovely long chat in the IKEA café after we were done sketching. Getting free coffee with our IKEA family cards was also pretty sweet. 😆

As usual when sketching, I was drawn to the most colorful parts of the building. That’s why I made a bee line for the children’s section.

There they had a lot of stuffed animals massed together in cages and displays, like an overly plentiful zoo.

I thought it was interesting how all of these octopuses and turtles were crammed together in such small spaces. They ceased to become individual objects and just became a pattern with random heads sticking out here and there.

It reminded me of that viral video of the guy who taught an octopus how to play piano. I’m all for anything that helps people see octopuses in a better light. 💡
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08/10/2025

Over a year ago (I am very behind in posting! 🙈) I went sketching with the Amsterdam Urban Sketchers by Noorderkerk. We were lucky to have great weather. Mass ended during our meetup so we also had a lot of happy people milling around our front and church bells to groove along to.

We had a higher turnout than normal at this event because a famous American sketcher announced she would come to the meetup. Unfortunately she didn’t end up traveling to Amsterdam at all due to the death of a friend. But there were still many people I’ve never seen before who made the time to come sketch with us.

I’m hoping now that we have an Instagram account .amsterdam.urban.sketchers we can replicate the success of this event and get more people to come and sketch with us!

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03/09/2025

It’s a new school year, which means we’re back to horse riding lessons. I was finally feeling bold enough to sketch some horses. But it’s still kind of difficult, so I started with drawing the horse’s butt. 🐎 🍑😆

As usual, the horse was gone by the time I finished my 30 minute sketch. But I did get a visit from the local snaggletooth cat, who bares a strong resemblance to a jaguar. 🐈‍⬛ 🐆

Cuddling with him on the bench made the random sandstorm that passed over us much more pleasant. Random cat cuddles - another benefit of urban sketching! ✍️

28/08/2025

I learned about many things growing up, including Hannibal crossing the Alps, by watching The Simpsons.

This summer when making a quick visit to my family in Brno, I stopped by the Vagner shopping center and found this extensive selection of elephant erasers, the same ones recommended by in his drawing basics class.

I was thrilled. And with most of them costing less than 50 cents, I had to get all of them. Now I can re-create my own artsy version of Hannibal crossing the Alps on my sketchbook. Watch out Romans, I’m coming for you! 🤪 🐘🏔️🐘🐘🐘🐘🏔️🐘🐘

Adres

Amsterdam

Website

https://viktorianight.com/

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