Rachael Koppendrayer's Blog

Dala horses have a very traditional style as a rule, but that’s not to say painters of Dala horses don’t have fun trying new things now and then. There are some beautiful Dala horses painted in only shades of black, white, and gray, with elegant kurbits (rosemaling) designs on the body. So with a more Norwegian-themed drawing–Norwegian Fjord horses, Hardanger fiddle, mountains, and a glimmer of an actual fjord–a more Norwegian design on the horses seemed appropriate!

Backgrounds have long been a challenge for me (hence the white background of many of my early drawings), but when I had the idea for this one, I knew that background would be nearly as important as the subject matter. A friend who specializes in watercolors had recently been telling me about technique she’d learned for creating distance – the further it is, the more blue you add. With a series of mountains that for all practical purposes look to be aligned on the page, this piece of advice came in handy for creating distance down valley! The farther away in the picture, the cooler and paler the colors, while the closer, the warmer and richer.

The post Dala Horse Serenade Drawing Progression first appeared on Rachael Koppendrayer.

It’s nice to be home again from the flurry of Scandinavian Festivals! I could do without repeating the adventure of a flat tire on the way home (naturally with a trunk full of tables and card rack pieces!), and the blister on thumb after drawing for two days (which seems to be a relapsed blister, if such a thing exists, after hand sawing on a tree stump a week earlier), but I had a fantastic time at the Twin Ports Scandinavian Festival and Hostfest. Now, a couple days after getting home and well before I’ve evaluated my inventory and put anything away (you can imagine the chaos), my order of 4.25×5.5″ cards has arrived! These all go toward making packs of cards.

The Little Critters pack is new and finally printed a good year after I finished them all, with Badger, Bear, Bobcat, Coyote, Deer, Raccoon, Skunk, and Squirrel cards.

The Minnesota Wildflowers Collection 1 has been updated for the first time since I put it together; partly because I’d like to work on changing the two Wildflower packs into Woodland Wildflowers and Prairie Wildflowers (collection 1 being woodland), and partly to freshen it up with some new drawings. For instance, the daylily (a non-native garden escapee) has been swapped for a similarly colored native Wood Lily, and the Small White Lady’s Slipper (which is the only lady’s slipper that grows on the prairie) has been exchanged for the deep woods-loving Stemless Lady’s Slipper. When I’m closer to running out of Wildflowers Collection 2, I’ll get to work changing over that one into the prairie wildflowers.

The Dala Animals Collection 2 has also been updated with a couple swaps. My most common request has been for all four reflection drawings to be included together in the pack, since I completed the Norwegian Fjord Reflection much later than the first three. It is a change I wholeheartedly agree with! I also really loved the Dala Rooster: Wake-Up Call, so that one got swapped in, and the rooster it is replacing will transfer to Collection 1 when it’s time to reorder that one again.

Christmas is coming, and I have For Unto Us (the nativity card) back in stock! After several requests, I printed Get Your Goat, the Tomte and Yule goat duo, for packs this year. I have plans to create a pack of a mix of Tomte cards, but I’ll have to finish a fourth drawing first, so it may be a year or two by the time they’re printed. And the Chickadees are an old favorite that work as Christmas cards or just a nice winter scene.

So that’s all the new packs! I’ll be updating the store as I get them put together!

The post New cards are in! first appeared on Rachael Koppendrayer.

Badgers are so cute. Also terrifying in their adult form. They are closely related to wolverines, after all! One summer I was biking along the Wobegon Trail just east of Sauk Centre, where a tall, grassy bank rises up to some fields, and something about the bank had changed. I couldn’t put my finger on what it was until suddenly a badger popped up out of the hole on top of the embankment. That’s when I realized a whole section of hillside had been terraformed by badgers–mounds of dirt everywhere. The badger stared at me, and I stared at him, thankful for the the length of the embankment and ditch between us, but still ready to take off on my bike at the blink of an eye. Finally he popped back down the hole, and I continued on my way. Just as quickly as the badger had moved in, he moved on, and it has returned to an innocuous grassy bank. Badgers may be hard on farmland, but more effective rodent and varmint hunters you’ll be hard-pressed to find!

The post Badger Progression first appeared on Rachael Koppendrayer.

There’s just something precious about newborn fawns. They’ll stay so still you could step on them if you’re not paying attention to where you’re walking, but it doesn’t take long before they are up and running!

A Leg Up

The post Deer Progression first appeared on Rachael Koppendrayer.

Get Your Goat, or The Festival Drawing

I think the most impressive thing with this drawing is that I did it basically in two days at the Scandinavian Festival in Moorhead, while simultaneously selling art and chatting with festival-goers. I had already decided to do art demonstrations at Høstfest later in the fall, and so when the option came up for the Moorhead Scandinavian Festival, I figured it would be a good practice run for Høstfest, which runs twice as long and there’s no option to run home overnight and grab forgotten supplies. I never did get around to printing reference photos to bring along, so I’m impressed with how well I did without them (I’m beginning to suspect they’re a crutch I’ve largely grown out of but have been reluctant to give up). By the time I got home after the two-day sale, all that needed doing was some work on the wood grain of the barn and a few touch-ups. It took less than an hour to finish everything!

It was especially fun having other vendors and people involved in the festival run over periodically to check on the progress. When I’m working, I feel like I’m going so as molasses in January, but for someone who is busy participating in a Viking battle reenactment every couple hours, they see significant changes every time they stop by.

I’ll definitely do more in-festival demonstrations in the future!

Get Your Goat

The post Get Your Goat Progression first appeared on Rachael Koppendrayer.

I thought it would be fun to compile all my art doings for the year in one place. It certainly was busy, at least in terms of new drawings!

New DrawingsState CollagesEvents

Moorhead Scandinavian Festival (June 21-22, Moorhead, MN)

Art Around the World at Great River Arts (July 26, Little Falls, MN)

Twin Ports Rosemaling Society Scandinavian Festival (September 21, Proctor, MN)

Høstfest (September 25-28, Minot ND)

Looking ahead to the new year:

It’s a bit early to announce events, since most of them haven’t been officially announced themselves. But I am committed to be in Sioux Falls, SD for the Daughters of Norway convention July 17th (it’s a Thursday, not a weekend). I expect to participate in the Moorhead and Twin Ports festivals like usual. Hopefully Hostfest as well, though my free housing is moving away, so that will take some research and logistics evaluation before I make the commitment. And later in the fall, I hope to be in the Twin Cities for a sale or two. Hard to believe, but it will be my first time doing events down there! And who knows what else the year may bring?

As to projects, I have a couple ideas in mind for more Scandinavian pictures. I’m beginning to run low on various packs of cards, so it’s the time to reevaluate and figure out what (if any) pictures I want to change out before reordering. That may result in a new picture or two, if I can ever make up my mind what I want to do. As my husband can attest, making the decision is the part I struggle with, not the labor. In 2024 I had a much longer list of projects I wanted to be sure to do (and I pretty much made it through the list). So what comes out of my pencil box may be as much a surprise to me as to you!

Have a blessed new year!

The post Looking back at 2024 first appeared on Rachael Koppendrayer.

I’m selling out my mugs, so through Dec 7, mugs are $12.60 (aka 30% off) on my website!

Since my supplier changed their shipping policies a little over a year ago (which tripled the cost of mugs), I have decided to discontinue carrying mugs. I still have a small supply of them, though! Most are nature related, but there are a couple dragons and Dala animals (sorry, all out of horses). They are currently marked down to $12.60. Shipping costs still apply. After Dec 7th, the price will go up again. Once I’m out of a mug, I’m out, so if you’re interested, better hurry!

Below is a sample of what is left, but check out the full inventory of remaining mugs HERE.

To be honest, I did not even consider Black Friday when I finally got around to inventorying the mugs just before Thanksgiving, so the timing is not due to my planning or strategy. But I will take it!

The post Mug sale! first appeared on Rachael Koppendrayer.

Sledding Progression

I’ve done several dala horse drawings with little girls, so it was time to do one with the boys. Obviously they would be inclined toward innocent fun that their mother may not be aware of (aka mischief).

Once I decided to have a farm background for the intrepid sledders, I sketched in what I remembered of our old barn while I was growing up. The barn was around 100 years old; my great-grandpa built it after he moved here from Sweden in the late 1800’s, and it was the only barn until my dad built a bigger cow barn in the 70’s. As kids, we spent a lot of time in the old barn: the chickens were in possession main floor (and one of my chores was picking eggs every day), and the haymow was a frequent source of entertainment – it was a popular place for cats to have kittens, and we could build hay forts up there without getting in trouble. So I had a pretty good picture in my head of how the barn looked.

Of course, it wasn’t until I had basically finished the drawing that I dug through old photo albums to find an actual photograph of it. It turns out my memories from age 13 aren’t exactly accurate. I got the silos basically right, at least, and they’re roughly in the correct proportion to the barn. I just vastly misremembered my size (or rather the size of all the doors, windows and openings) in comparison to the size of the building itself.

So here we have photographs of the reality of the barn and a drawing of my memory of the barn. It’s funny how the two diverge over time.

Yep, that’s 13-year-old me on the left The Old Barn circa 2001

The post Sledding Progression first appeared on Rachael Koppendrayer.

It’s Scandimonium time! The end of September marks two Scandinavian festivals back-to-back: the Twin Ports Rosemaling Society’s Scandinavian Festival in Proctor, MN, on Saturday, Sept 21, and Høstfest in Minot, ND, Sept 25-28. I have less than 48 hours between returning home from one and leaving for the next.

If you’ve never been to Minot, ND (and I hadn’t until going to Høstfest last year), it’s a neat city. Navigating can be a challenge with the Souris River horseshoeing its way through town, and lots of up and down on hills in the river valley. But it’s a lovely city. Last year I made sure to tour the Scandinavian Heritage Park before the festival began, which has a replica of a Norwegian stave church (built entirely of wood, no nails), a Danish windmill, a Swedish Dala Horse, and lots of other Scandinavian attractions.

Scandinavian Heritage Park No Lutefisk Fishing Allowed Stave Church Gatehouse and Bell Full-scale replica of stave church in Gol, Norway Stave Church details Norwegian Stabbur (storehouse) 27-foot high Dala Horse Proof I was there

This year at Høstfest I’ll be joining the artisans in Copenhagen Hall (where all the vendors demonstrate their craft). Colored pencil drawing feels a little boring compared to some of the other crafts being demonstrated, but maybe that’s my bias from overexposure. Here’s my booth in Helsinki Hall in 2023:

See you in the Twin Ports or Høstfest!

The post Scandinavian Festivals, here I come! first appeared on Rachael Koppendrayer.

Yellow Morel Drawing Progression

Morels: the most coveted mushroom of Minnesota. And possibly North America, but I have no statistics to prove it (not that I have for Minnesota, either, but it must be the State Mushroom for a reason).

Mushroom identification can be terrifying to some. Morels (any of the Morchella genus) are pretty easy, though–as long as the brain-like cap attaches all the way down the stem (not overhanging it like an umbrella), and the stem is hollow all the to the top, it’s a true morel and safe to eat. Highly poisonous false morels tend to look different enough anyway, with reddish, blobby caps and solid, meaty stems. But there is one tricky little look-alike called the Wrinkled Thimble-Cap or Early Morel (Verpa bohemica), that attaches the cap at the very top of the stem (much like a thimble set on a stick), and it’s stems are semi-hollow with whispy cottony bits inside. They aren’t deadly, but they can give you a royal headache if you eat them by mistake (just ask my mom).

The post Morel Progression first appeared on Rachael Koppendrayer.