Stencils, printmaking tools, ballpoint pen and actyling markers. Click on the image to see a larger version and some finger smudges (somehow drawing with markers always ends up being a finger painting ordeal for me!).
Sketching, Illustration, Design and Everyday Life.
Copyright by © Nina Khashchina except where noted.
Sketching on a Campus of San José State University
Two views from the same bench on the campus of San José State University.
House with Tulips
This was one of those outings that was planned, then did not happen on time, and then happened unexpectedly on a different day. And it was such a good part of my week that I loved these two sketches for that only. However, I struggled a lot with the shapes of the house and lack of focus on the page. I was overwhelmed by the abundance of shapes and colors, and let go of all the thinking and only moved paint on the page until it was time to run to the next thing in my day. Gouache is a perfect medium for this way of working I think - there is much layering on this page with paint, pencils, crayons - and it allowed me to create all the iterations. Click on the image to see it larger.
Art exhibits that I want to see in 2025
(this drawing from my sketchbook is here because I think every post needs an image)
1. David Hockney Is Taking Over the Entire Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. David Hockney is one of my all-time art heroes and his ability to work at put together such a huge exposition at 87 is definitely one of the reasons for that. There are several great articles about the show:
in Vogue: https://www.vogue.com/article/david-hockney-fondation-louis-vuitton
in New York Times (this article is unlocked via Austin Kleon's Newsletter which I recommend to people on a weekly basis!)
2. Ruth Asawa: Retrospective - in San Francisco MOMA. In 2023 I wrote about Ruth Asawa exhibit in Whitney Museum of American "Through Line" and then read all I could find about her. Since then I slowly track down and visit all of her art (there is much to go still) - but this retrospective will move me a lot on my quest!
3. The Met has "Sargent and Paris" From April 27 till August 3 of this tear. Sargent is one of the painters whose works I love to see in person. There is so much in the dance of the brush, so much color and light in layers and so much in seemingly empty parts of the paintings!
4. Palazzo Barberini (check out their logo!!) in Rome has Caravaggio 2025 - which is an extensive collection of works, including some "recently authenticated" - but to see such a collection on one place? That is a gift!
5. Wayne Thiebaud: Art Comes from Art is in Legion of Honor in San Francisco! Did you know that Wayne Thiebaud played tennis even after turning 100? And painted too! And he was an artist who was thinking with both his art and words - as a teacher for many years. Did you hear about a Cake Event in San Francisco - in honor of this exhibition? Here is a great article about it by Wendy MacNaughton (whose substack I also recommend). https://club.drawtogether.studio/p/let-us-eat-cake
Here is a video that accompanies the exhibit: https://www.famsf.org/stories/wayne-thiebaud-film
ANd an article: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/apr/16/wayne-thiebaud-san-francisco-exhibition
That's it for now.
What exhibitions are you looking forward to?
Glorious Godwood Trees
On one of my bike rides, I found lots of blooming dogwood trees and picked this particular set of two - with a carpet of tulips and daffodils under it - for a special little outing.
I was in the middle of an experiment with several materials at once right before this outing and ended up with very little ability to plan this sketch - which means I ended up with several separate vignettes stitched together.
Now that I look at my sketches from a few days ago, I have to run and catch some of these flowers in my sketchbook again!
Magnolia Season - Part Two.
I wrote about my adventures of sketching magnolias at the peak of their season in March. The season is over in the sense that the trees are no longer stunning bouquets of pink that make you stop everything and rush out to look. But they continue to bloom somewhat, now flowers are hidden by the leaves. As the summer comes, I will be looking for the next stage in the magnolia saga - when large, heavy-petaled white flowers of the largest Magnolia trees - Magnolia grandiflora. And after that - magnolia seed pods!
However, I got a few sketches in before all the greens took over - here they are.
Reading Notes: Zen of Drawing
Continuing a "Reading Notes" series on this blog to share some of the things I read.
One of the facets of my reading life is reading "eye candy" books - these are books that get to look at images - and not necessarily read all the text. Some of these books I stumble upon myself, and some are recommended to me directly or indirectly. A book I wanted to tell about was mentioned by an artist I admire and it was described as a "when I am in a rut I open this book and all of a sudden my enthusiasm is back and I am eager to draw". This description made me very curious and I got to the library right away.
One of the facets of my reading life is reading "eye candy" books - these are books that get to look at images - and not necessarily read all the text. Some of these books I stumble upon myself, and some are recommended to me directly or indirectly. A book I wanted to tell about was mentioned by an artist I admire and it was described as a "when I am in a rut I open this book and all of a sudden my enthusiasm is back and I am eager to draw". This description made me very curious and I got to the library right away.
Many books in the field of sketching are lessons in sketching illustrated by collections of works of multiple artists. This book also goes through a whole bunch of "ideas of what to learn and how to use it". From tools of the trade to an interesting approach to describing a vocabulary of movements and marks one makes when drawing and how to apply them. However, this book represents the works of one artist only - through many years of sketching (25-30 years I think) and covers many media that this artist is using throughout all the years. It is a celebration of doing many different things and not sticking to one "tried and true" medium. We follow works in graphite, colored pencils, direct watercolor, ink brushes, mixed media, and drawing on an iPad. It is a retrospective - and I enjoyed looking at it as such and tracing changes that happened with time as well as parallels of the same voice - in different mediums, through series and experiments.
If you have a book - or several - that bring your enthusiasm back - I would love to know - as always, both comment and email work :)
A Blooming Cacti!
My friend found some incredible blooming cacti and we had a lovely lunch & sketch outing drawing them!
Surprising for me was the length of the flower itself and how much space you can see. Star-like stigma was especially beautiful! Also - how much fragrance do these flowers carry! (still sneezing :) I did not see bees but I believe they are the main pollinators - though judging by the amount of space a small pigeon also can be tempted.
The most challenging part was judging colors in a very bright sun - so I picked a few markers and pencils and was disciplined about not using everything I had. I really liked little super-furry cacti babies on tops of the plants - they looked like a good reason to come back to this corner :)
Virtual Traveling (with Street View World Tour) - Boats throughout the world!
On the first Thursday of each month, a lovely group of people from all over the world gets together to sketch from the google street views. This month we were drawing boats and a guest artist was Nina Johansson - whose careful weaving of the ink line was very therapeutic and her demonstration of varied line made with a custom fude nib in a popular TWSBI pen - was a pleasure to watch. We looked at boats in Stockholm, London, and Hong Kong and every single drawing below challenged me in a new way. I am not brave enough to sail in any of these based on my drawings - but I am braver about the general idea of drawing boats after this hour! 
If you are not familiar - A Street View World Tour is a fun, no-pressure gathering hosted by Jenny Adam and Eleanor Doughty via Gage Academy. You can learn more about these monthly free events and about these locations at the links above.
My previous participations include a trip to Kharkiv, Ukraine where I was the guest artist, Drawing Sky Holes, Kenya, Boats, Night Life, Hawaiian Foliage, Light and Shadow, and Japan, Ohio, Arizona and Taipei, Convenience Stores Around the World, Castles, Portugal (I am quite sure that I participated in a few more but I am not sure I ever posted about them - will try to find and add to this collection!)
On My Table: Beginning of April 2025.
I have a bunch of tips for you on display from my monthly "on my work table" collection:
1. Make-up removal wipes are removing ink from my fingers much better than just paper towels or even wet wipes. I am not sure what is in them and I stumbled into this solution by accident - but the results are in: if you need presentable fingers after an ink incident (or a regular painting outing in my case) - make-up removal wipes are quite useful!
2. I got an ink bottle gifted to me - and for a few days, I tried opening it with the regular tools (soaking in water, intensive cursing, and a rubber sheet wrapped around the cover). However, I saw that Andrew James was using hot water to open his watercolor tubes and decided to give it a go - worked like a charm: just pour hot water on the lid!
3. Over the years I collected a wonderful range of pencils from different manufacturers. But choosing which ones to use when I see them all in one place is a task that takes up too much of my willpower. So my solution is: I make a palette of 3-10 pencils and carry them for a few days, and then I change them up. The trick is to make the choice super quickly and then live with those choices and use whatever colors you have - but use them actively. And then - when you look at the results of what you did - ask what worked, what did not, what colors you missed, and which ones you want to keep in the next set. Also - keep rotating through them all - so many new color combos are in store!
4. Gouache - both traditional and acrylic - is quite expensive. But there are some colors you might be using way more than others - a good example is permanent white. For me, it is also golden ochre and ultramarine :) Getting a larger bottle for those "high use" colors will save you some money - for example, Schmincke has 250 ml bottles.
That's it for now - illustrations to all of these and more are in the image below! Feel free to drop me a line with your solutions to these problems (and secret tricks in general!)
An Orchard Past Its Prime: Saratoga
For several years now Suhita Shirodkar and I have made a pilgrimage to paint at the orchard by the Saratoga Public Library. Knotty, shapely, dark silhouettes of fruit trees covered in gentle white blossoms, lots of space between us and Santa Cruz Mountains, and yellow mustard fields are what we are after. This year we were joined by Laurie Wigham whom we promised all the things we hoped to see. However, the orchard was quite different. It was an unusually hot day for March (it reached 83F where we were located), a few days prior we had a storm, and most of the blossoms were gone. And on top of it, all the ground was thoroughly plowed - there were mustard plants here and there but no feeling of a "carpet". Our reality did not match our expectations, to say the least.
But a huge oak tree had a very dense shadow, and the gnarliness of the trees could not be erased by wind or tractor! Plus all sorts of creatures came over to be with us while we painted - and by the end, it was a wonderful outing of talking and drawing side-by-side with great people and it filled my cup at least as much as I expected - if not more!
More Camellias!
My quest for painting camellias continues! The color of the deep red-coral ones still escapes me, and I found some off-white ones I sketched in Gamble Gardens.
two previous camelias-related posts from this year:
Camellias in a different medium
two previous camelias-related posts from this year:
Camellias in a different medium
Two more sketches from the Orchard Outing: Teaching Experiment
Last week I shared my sketch - spread over two pages of a new (to me) sketchbook (it is a Pith sketchbook - more about it soon as I continue some experiments). I made two more sketches at the same outing and it took me some time to scan them properly and think about what was working and not working for me. Mainly because I created these sketches based on the workshops that I will be running this summer. I will be teaching two sessions at the Chicago Urban Sketchers Seminar on July 11-13 and then a week later a little different version of the workshop but with the same technique - at the Sketcher Fest Edmonds. Two sketches below were a run through the process which I will be sharing. I know that Chicago is sold out but I believe some tickets are still available for Edmonds!
An Orchard is Thinking About Blooming
We had a tumultuous March - some bright sunshine on cold days, some very warm rains, a couple of atmospheric rivers, a few crazy winds, and at least one dense hail. So I am not entirely sure what this orchard is thinking - did it try to bloom and the wind got all the flowers? Is it waiting for a proper start of spring? Is it as confused about the future as I am? I passed by it a couple of times trying to gauge when would be a good time to come over and sketch it and could not make up my mind but then an opportunity presented itself and Suhita (@Suhita Shirodkar) joined me for this outing to Los Altos Hills - it was short but accompanied by singing birds and we saw some unusually large California poppies - which means we soon will be heading for the hills to paint them!
I started thinking that I would make a one-page sketch but quickly realized that I wanted to expand to a much wider view and used both pages - so not a lot of planning went into this composition but in my defense, I can say that I was too distracted by courting turkeys between the trees and dreams of bringing a concertina to get a whole horizon in. Turkeys did not make it to my sketch though. Tender pink flowers on the branches are telling me I will get at least one more chance with this landscape before a delicate monolith of leaves obscures the structure of branches that I love so much.
There were other sketches from the same outing and I will share them too when I process them - when I figure out what bothers me about those sketches :)
Cooking Disaster - Illustrated
I enjoy cooking for an everyday chance to experiment, an opportunity to work with other people, and, frankly, because I love to eat. In particular, I like making desserts and one of the reasons is because I get to eat them and then draw them and then eat more of them. Making cookies is such a satisfying thing - while you are working a dough you can get a lot of energy out of your system, or in when you are tasting them :) I've been making oatmeal cookies for years and some come out as good as a song, others are great, sometimes they are a reliable staple, but recently I had a batch that... was a fiasco.
After tasting this cardboard I realized that I forgot to put sugar and it is actually a very much needed ingredient for other components to work! It melts and binds and seeps and it makes the cookie a cookie!
After a day or two I made a fresh batch - just to mend my discolored self-esteem and because I wanted an oatmeal cookie - and this time my creation was devoured with the usual speed - so all is good now. Lesson learned!
Camellias in a different medium
Last week I posted my "work in progress" on catching camellia colors in my sketchbook. While I struggled with the color problem I had a lovely art date with a friend whom I promised to show my experiments with gelli plate monoprinting. I've been accumulating all sorts of knowledge about this tantalizing texture-making yet amazingly hard-to-control relatively new medium and we made a nice pile of "I wonder what will happen if I try this" and a few "here is how I can make a drawing and then make a print out of it" pages - here are some that did not make it to the recycling can immediately.
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First one is gelli place painting, second is a print pulled from the second image, last image is a third print pulled from the same original plate. Second print got trashed because I used too wet page to get it - the paper got ripped.
We were having too much fun for taking photos of the process :)
Four Attempts at Catching Camellia Colors.
On a day full of running errands, I stopped by my friend's place for a hug and a cup of chai. We ended up cutting a couple of branches from her camellia bush to sketch and then I took them home - they were my sketching companions for quite a bit.
What an amazingly layered flower - the structure of petals reminded me of tightly packed cones of the blue cedar tree and I definitely need to go back to these and try and figure out the color - even though I enjoyed mixing all of these none matches the slightly-transparent glowing orange hue of the camelia pink flowers. 
California: Mustard Fields and Blue Sky
Spring in the San Francisco Bay Area means lots of mustard flowers! My friend showed me one of the early fields, and as we were sitting there drawing a blanket of yellow flowers under the piercing California blue sky, we talked about Ukraine, America, the past, and the future.
I was torn between doing a full-color sketch in watercolor or gouache but then decided to dive in with the two main colors: blue and yellow and have the rest in monotone. Yellow proved to be a tricky layer as it did not go well over the gray texture that I created - so I added darker tones as a background and then used white gouache, and when it dried - yellow oil pastel (from Jennifer's kit). The sketch turned out not as I thought as my yellow is a much gentle but I like how it did not overwhelm the rest of the sketch.
Magnolia Season
Magnolias are among my favorite plants and when they bloom it is one of my "great color experiences of the year." So when it is upon us, I try to make it count. As we have many microclimates in the San Francisco Bay Area, the season rolls south to north and depends on waves in weather - so I got to sketch some in Suhita's neighborhood on a very hot day, and when trees near her started dropping their heavy petals on a sidewalk, trees near me were in peak - so we arranged for a second outing and got some time with these glorious flowers. 
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