Apple-Pine: 2025

Drawing at a Rally in Support For Ukraine

Another protest, another rally for Ukraine. Drawing in San Francisco on Sunday, while a very one-sided 28-point plan for peace is hanging in the air. So-called peace plan demands Ukraine give up territory (including not currently occupied), limits the size of its army, and agrees not to pursue russia for the war crimes. Nobody wants this war to end as the Ukrainians do. But this has to be a lasting solution made with Ukraine and not dictated by anyone!

Visiting a Magical Forest

Every year, Suhita Shirodkar and I make a pilgrimage to the Santa Cruz Mountains to see our friends in a wonderful community surrounding Gay Kraeger. And to draw an astonishing view of glowing persimmon trees. This time, the period between our last visit and this one was so packed with events for everyone that we ended up coming two weeks in a row to cover all the stories, share new materials, plans, and projects! One day was gloriously sunny, and we had a chance to draw persimmon trees, and another was magnificently foggy - so we ended up trying all sorts of art toys in a cozy, warm studio with a cup of tea while fog slowly melted around redwoods, which we drew. Click on the images to see larger version!

A New Chisel Pen I Tried

I am a big fan of drawing tools - and some version of a chisel pen is almost always in my tool kit. (for example, my latest travel sketching kit had one, and I missed having another). So when I saw that a new type of chisel tip pen appeared on the market, I had to try it - especially since it came in 4 different widths and several colors!

This pen is made in the EU, and is called "Manuscript Callicreative Italic Markers" and the nibs are:

Fine Point (1.4 mm)

Medium Point (2.5 mm)

Broad Point (3.6 mm)

Extra Broad Point (4.8 mm)

Below is a page from my sketchbook where I wrote my impressions. I got only black color, but did not read the description well enough to see that it is not waterproof ink. Which is a lot of fun by itself - if you are planning for it!

The range of widths is a welcome thing for me compared to chisel nibs from Faber-Castell. But because of the way the pen is built, I was having a hard time placing the nib intuitively - and had to look at the page more often. The barrel is a little too slippery for me - in a photo below you will see that I put some tape to remedy that. But the ink is flowing generously and is really lovely, solid black, and you can move it quite a bit - especially if the paper has good sizing. And if it does not have any - the pen is almost waterproof!

You know November is Here When...

In the San Francisco Bay Area, Fall is a slow-moving season, and everyone navigates it differently. For me, when I see some maple trees worth sketching (they come before the Chinese Pistaches that put fire in the neighborhood and before ginkos that make you wish for 100 different shades of yellow pencils), and when you draw your first persimmons of the season, the fall is really here!

Trip to The East Coast - Part 5: Materials After Returning

As I mentioned in my original materials post for this trip, I did my best to note what I was missing during the trip, what I used most, and what I did not touch at all, and here are some results:

1. This was a very short trip, so this amount of gouache was enough, but if I were traveling for a longer time, I would definitely take some tubes to both refill my palette and also to have access, for some "just out of the tube" thick paint that is needed, at the finishing touches, often. I had five different blues so I was fine - but yellows were

2. I really enjoyed my first-ever posca pencil (ivory) - it was doing a really good job covering over other materials.

3. Little gouache sticks are amazing - I wish they were more widely spread - but access to this instant color with the possibility of texture is for me a difference between starting a sketch or not - if I feel like I do not have enough time.

4. I missed yellow. I have a favorite yellow marker at the moment, it is semi-transparent and layers over other colors in such a luminous way that I can use it with just one other color and still call it a full-color sketch.

5. I missed some purple. I had a violet-gray from Luminance but needed something brighter. And I missed some brown, which I tried to figure out at the end of my sketchbooks, going over all the browns I could find, but I did not pinpoint what exactly was missing. This is something to remember for the next time: to write a little more about the color that I am missing - brown is not enough! After all, when I am teaching, I always ask people to use at least 3, between 4 and 5 words to describe color - why didn't I do it myself and just scribbled "missing brown"?

6. I missed my Pilot Parallel pen - I had a great substitute (zig calligraphy), but this beauty is capable of making such an expressive line that the sheer prospect of seeing it glide on the page can be a motivation enough for me to take a little sketching break. I guess rule number one of packing for a trip is "take your favorite tool" :)

here are some color-swatching pages on which I was trying to figure out what exact color I was missing:

Trip to The East Coast 2025:
Part 1: Packing My Sketch Tools
Part 2: People, Bids, Animals and Apples
Part 3: Landscapes
Part 4: More Landscapes
Part 5: What Materials worked and what I missed
Video of the Sketchbook Flip-Through.

Trip to The East Coast - Part 4: More Landscapes.

On this trip, every single location was worth sketching - it was marvelously inspiring in both color and light.

All of the sketches below (except for the very last one, which was done with highlighters as a first layer and then a black zig calligraphy marker) started with a big and super quick gouache wash. Some you see as they were on location, others I finished from photos and memory, as color pencils work the best on a dry surface (especially when the paper is soft), and I really wanted to bring up some light and push back some dark parts. Now I am not sure which one is my favorite and if adding things later made such a great difference - but they all bring back lots of great memories :) Click on the images to see them larger!

Trip to The East Coast - Part 3: Landscapes (about half of them).

I will break this post into two as there are quite a few drawings and some of them I would like to annotate more than others. As always you can see larger image if you click on it.

This is one of my favorite sketches from the trip - I painted with gouache without any drawing underneath and added some lines with zig calligraphy pen mid-drawing when I thought that I might have to stop abruptly. But since I had some more time I added more gouache over the ink lines.

There two pages of sketches above started super quickly, using markers to put down large shapes and then most of details in the three-sketch page were added from photos and sketch on the right was completed on location - which shows that by having more time I get to a better contrast place with my sketches. You can see some of the gorgeous paper from my hand-made sketchbook as a border on the left sketch above.

This was a very fast attempt to catch lightness of the lake behind darker but also more detailed trees in the front. I started with super fast layer of gouache used as watercolor but it was too wet to finish right away. And I lost both the light and freshness when I tried to pick it up on the way back to the car. I like some dynamic pencil lines though and I think dark green works really nice with the pumpkin orange and washed yellow with gray purple.

Trip to The East Coast - Part 2: People, Birds, Animals and Apples

Here is a selection of sketches which will tell you about people that I met at airports, a porcupine that I met in the woods and lots of apples and animals that I found on a Pennsylvania farm. Oh - and birds - these were identified using my phone and drawn based on some images I found online in inaturalist and cornell bird id apps.

Trip to The East Coast - Part 1 (Slow Road to Trimming My Tools: Part 2)

When I got my tickets to visit New York and Pennsylvania in late October, I knew that I would like to apply my "let's trim my tools" mindset to choosing what would go with me. In preparation, I looked at the sketches I did during my last year's trip, and also remembered that neither a temperamental flex nib fountain pen nor bottles of acrylic ink are good ideas. But my experience with acrylic inks gave me an idea to think about some tools to make large shapes super quickly and simply - for this, I took some highlighters and a couple of markers. And experience with the pen I love gave me an idea to bring only writing instruments that I know well and that bring me joy by sheer use of them (pentel pocket brush pen and zig calligraphy marker). And for adding texture and details, I decided to select some pencils. My choice of colors was heavily influenced by the colors I saw in my last year's photos, and also the idea that I will need to have something that would work on a wet surface as well as on dry, be able to work as a super dark color, but also be able to cover something else to make it lighter. Neocolor II crayons in this set were playing the same role of "have to be able to cover marks made by other tools to transform them into something very different". A little gelatti gouache stick from Faber Castell was something that I recently picked up, and it worked in the same capacity (instant sky). Here is how my kit looked like:

and packed:

I wanted to have a gouache set with me, and it proved to be a source of joy on many occasions - both for making large shapes, being super quick, and also for bringing textures and layering colors. Two waterbrushes were enough for this particular trip - one flat, one round, both capable of many marks, especially if you control the flow of water (for those little packable towels that Uma Kelkar got me into are invaluable!). My minimal gouache palette lives in a Pocket Palette from Art Tool-Kit and here are colors (addition of lilac was last minute and somehow I did not use it)

I was also in a rare position when I was about to finish my sketchbook number 161 - so what do I want from my next sketchbook was a question I asked myself first. I knew that I would not have time for a proper watercolor painting, so paper had to be something that would work with a wide range of materials but would withstand some rough treatment. And since I knew that I wanted to pack light, I thought about making this a special sketchbook - about this trip only. In my collection of sketchbooks, there are a few hand-made, and this particular one I made under the guidance of my friend Gay Kraeger some time ago. Embarrassingly long ago, if I am honest. I liked it so so much that I frequently opened it up and considered, but was never sure what would be a good enough occasion to start it... I am working on transforming the "it is too good to be used" mindset, so this was a perfect moment to have something special for this trip.

Size: 5.5" x 7.5" Paper: hot press Fabriano Artistico 140 lbs.

I also had my pocket printmaking toolset with a home-made sponge dauber and inks in a little tower, but I used both very little. Thinking back, I think I did not pack these tools into a separate bag that would be easy to locate in my backpack - something to think about in the future.

I will make another post with some notes on what I missed and comments on some thinking behind my color choices to remember for the future and will add link here. UPDATE: here is a post and video of the whole sketchbook.

Slow Road to Trimming My Tools: Part 1

After some travels this summer, I made this sketch note to myself:

I've been there before and was usually able to remove extra stuff within one "re-packing" session. But this time, I noticed a resistance on many levels. I had so many things in my backpack I felt a need to separate different drawing tools into different themes/bags/boxes, and then I was not sure what was it what box and what exactly I liked or used the last time? And I kept getting some glimpses about "that great tool that once was amazing," where is it? After some time, I realized that I've spent more time looking at my tools and putting them from one bag into another than actually drawing, and that is when I knew that I was in real trouble. Because now I had more bags in front of me than before, and zero willpower to make any choices about what to use in my sketch. I ended up not drawing on that day (apart from the following doodle, which I did on my iPad after I upgraded to procreate, and saw all the new brushes, which did not help with the previous situation).

So I stopped and decided to look at what people are doing, talk to friends about this, give this transformation some time but make a log of what approaches I am trying, what is working and what is not and get myself out there sketching more. And I decided to share the process as I go - because I am sure I am not the only one and because this way I will have something to refer to.

First, I asked myself what are some of my favorite tools and what kinds of marks I am after in them. So I cleaned and refilled my Ackerman Pen. Here is a page created with it right after.

This en is not an easy character to deal with - but I remembered that when I make it work, it brings me joy. Testing out what marks I can make and what I really liked, how different holds gave me different feels, was the most useful part of this experiment.

Next I took my Pilot Parallel Pen with a modified nib (I cannot believe I never made a post about making it! - not to self: make one!). So I took this pen to an outing and drew with it almost 100% blindly. I made a sketch I enjoy looking at even right now - because I remember looking at the scene without breaking eye contact for a longer than usual time and I remember this time and scene so vividly!

And then a friend gave me a bunch of super bright acrylic inks, and I found one more to complement the trio, and I painted over this sketch - I had so much fun, I kept bringing those inks with me to a couple of outings after this. When I asked myself why, I realized that with these inks I can mix colors only by overlapping them on the page directly, and I can paint super fast, too. There are very few choices - I have only three bottles and a big brush.

I tried overlapping these inks with other tools and made more notes:

I think the most useful part was actually writing down what I like and then trying to use that one particular thing on the next sketch I had a chance to do. I hoped to apply this thinking to my packing for the travel but ended up with too many art supplies (as you can guess flying with acrylic inks or a leaky fountain pen in tow is a bit involved). So I took a different approach to choosing materials for the trip - and hope to tell you more about it in the next post!