I am excited to have my drawings in the Three Rivers Gallery & Gifts through March and April. The gallery is located inside the cozy Singer Hill Cafe in Oregon City. The gallery is hung salon style and offers paintings, drawings, ceramics, jewelry, and about anything you can think of. The cafe serves excellent coffee and features beautiful vertical gardens indoors and outdoors.
The artists’ reception will be on March 19, 2017 from 1 to 3 pm. Stop by if you are in the area to meet the artists and see their wonderful art.
Gathering I – pen & ink on drawing paper, 4″ x 6″
Gathering II ~ pen & ink on drawing paper, 4″ x 6″
Gathering III ~ pen and ink on drawing paper, 6″ x 4″
Gathering IV ~ pen and ink on drawing paper, 4″ x 4″
Gathering V ~ pen and ink on drawing paper, 4″ x 4″
Address: 613 7th Street, Oregon City, Oregon 97045, inside Singer Hill Cafe
Open: every day, 9 am – 4 pm.
Updated 6/6/17: My Golden Lilies are now coming back to their new (hopefully happy) US home because somebody saw them online and in their words, could not resist. Funny how art travels sometimes 🙂
An experiment with gel pens. It will be a part of the Twitter Art Exhibit that this year supports Molly Olly’s Wishes. Mailed it to UK today and hope it will get there safely.
This is my first semi-serious drawing in gel pens. I did sketches before, but they were line works, never pointillism. Turns out it’s more enjoyable to stipple, I just need to get a better grasp of color and opacity changes as gel inks dry and remembering how different pens interact when placed on top of each other.
Sadly, I missed the reception for this show because of the trip to Russia and didn’t have time to see it before leaving, so had to check it out after coming back. This was one impressive show, and not just because I love small works of art. It’s fascinating to see what different artists can do with the same set of four square canvases, how different their styles and subjects are, and how beautiful the walls covered with 8″ x 8″ squares look.
All my creatures were sold. Hopefully they all are sharing the same happy home now.
Sharon Orella, the show coordinator said that my artworks were very popular and sold very quickly. That’s very nice to hear; I hoped that my creatures would connect with people and be appreciated for their beauty and character.
That’s my sketch on the go from earlier this week finished. I wanted to see how much texture could be built on Canson drawing paper with pencils only, without any other tools. To my surprise, the paper let be create quite a few nice subtle patterns. I especially like those crossing lines on the horse.
I am going to be a part of an interesting show at the Sherwood Center for the Arts. Artist are challenged to create and complete four 8”x 8” painting canvases which are provided by the Center.
Because I do not paint, my entries are drawings attached to tissue paper collages that are attached to the canvases. The collage part is messy but beautiful and freeing. This is where I do not have to pay attention to details and can let pastels and rubbing alcohol do their magic on pieces of torn paper.
The show will run from October 21 to December 8, 2016. The Opening Gala will be on October 21.
A somewhat failed experiment with charcoal on top of soft pastels – I was aiming for a little different, more dramatic look. Apparently a workable fixative is not capable of holding even a thin amount of pastel in place, and it keeps mixing with charcoal. I wonder what would work better?
I started with lush lichen I saw here in Oregon during winter, but it ended looking like something that would be at home in the swamps of Florida. Sometimes non-committed sketching takes you to unexpected places.
The gallery received 900 entries from 24 different countries from around the world. The final selection features amazing creations in all kinds of different media, and I am happy to be a part of it.
The winning entries will be featured on the Light Space & Time website for the month of June 2016 and then will remain online in the Light Space & Time archives.
Decided to make progress with the horse first and with the window frame later. Both are going to differ a bit from my reference, and because the horse is more important I am going to figure out where his colors end before touching the window. I am now debating between natural wood and old paint that would compliment the horse.
Updated: April 26th, 2016
So it was a good idea to use graphite first, then continue with color on top of it. Maybe a softer grade like H6 would be more efficient, especially on a textured paper like this one. The disorganized colors that are already there are from different kinds of strokes I tried to see what works better.
Updated: December 10th, 2015
Back to the unfortunate horse who is now ready for color! I am done with the graphite underdrawing (if this is not a word it should be) and securing it with a workable fixative. Let’s see if that speeds up adding darks with colored pencils. Rainy shooting conditions made it look like there are at least two different tones of graphite, but in reality it’s the same tone.
Original post: Feb 21, 2015
I don’t think I have ever been this excited to see a rough drawing of a horse head finally appearing on a piece of paper as planned. There were at least two iterations that were not to my liking at all, but finally everything is where it should be, the sketch is transferred to the final watercolor paper (it’s a Strathmore one with nice slightly uneven surface), and I can move on to preliminary shading with graphite.
The horse is picking out of a barn door window, but it is barely visible right now. I need to decide whether to keep it white like in the reference photo or make it natural wood. The horse is going to be light chestnut with a lot of color nuances in the face, and even weathered white seems to be too stark next to all that, so most likely I will use some kind of amber or light wood for the window.
Did a sketch for a girl who loves horses (should probably be in all capitals and blinking) and dreams of riding her own horse one day. Until then, a very own drawing of her favorite 4-H equine will have to suffice. This is a Birthday gift to her from her big sister.
Zen Brush is a beautiful little app with only one step of undo and no way to save anything in its original format. No layers, the eraser is very primitive and does not help much, so best to leave it alone and pretend it’s not there at all. One black brush, two translucent gray brushes and an option to change the brush size. All brushes are round and look more and more like painting wet on wet as their sizes grow. That’s it. The app would be almost like a Zen board where your creating is gone forever unless you were quick enough to take a photo. Similarly, Zen Brush has an option to export the drawing as a PNG file.
My first semi-serious attempt to do a more than a rudimentary sketch in ArtFlow app. You know what’s the best part of working in it? It saves all changes automatically and seemingly in real time, at least I haven’t lost anything yet. And I think if I ever hit the limit on the number of layers in the file it will be my phone’s fault, not the app’s.
It started with a reference photo of majestic icicles which I managed to lose shortly after mapping some details in pencil. Not willing to dig through my huge and badly documented collections of shots taken over 15+ years, I decided to continue on my own and see where it ends. Somehow it ended in an abstract that has little to do with icicles or anything else of that kind, but it was fun to work through it without much commitment to the end result.
Miscalculated where the horse should go on the piece of paper, but otherwise happy with the sketch. The subject was a beautiful chestnut, most likely a resident of the horse boarding facility across the street from our home in Cupertino, CA.
It seems that the impending move to Oregon only leaves me time for quick sketches. My poor horse stays practically untouched since I defined main features of his face, several other serious drawings are also stuck at whatever stages they were when the decision was made.
Sorting out and getting rid of stuff (and now packing) is the exact opposite of fun, but sometimes nice discoveries happen. As I go through shelves of books I find all sorts of things in them: bookmarks made by kids, old postcards, images from copiers, and as of recently, dried flowers.
I am not even sure what kinds of flowers those are. They were very discolored, and as soon as I tied to remove them from a book promptly fell apart…
A kind visitor at the third weekend of recent Open Studios came up with the title, not me. I often draw during SVOS. People like to see how art is created, and whatever I am working on easily becomes a conversation piece. Sometimes I get a free benefit of getting stuff named for me.