Drawing People

My people drawing these days has a few stable outlets: my mirror, my parents, and two fantastic online portrait parties (I am a fan of Pencils4Tea on Thursdays and DrawingIsFree on Mondays). 

I will share some results from my encounters with the mirror and my sketches of parents in separate posts - but here are my latest portrait parties:

Virtual Traveling (with Street View World Tour) - Lisbon, Portugal!

I traveled (virtually) to Lisbon this week!  (It is definitely on my list of places to visit in real life - but for now this was great! :) I joined monthly online gathering of #streetviewworldtour - and had lots of fun drawing with a nice group of people (there were MANY this time!). 

This month a guest artist was Koosje Koene whose art I've been following for quite some time. Her presentation was wonderfully candid and her love for pentel pocket brush is something I share! 

 

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 (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!)

Avocados on Bookshelves

I learned recently that avocados (at least from the tree that I know) do not ripen on a tree - which is very convenient. We get one or two avocados every few days, create a chain of avocados on the bookshelves and then eat them as they slowly get ready. Or draw them.
Here are some from the last week's sketchbook :)

My Table Garden: Dark Red Ruffled African Violet and Not Lavender

I am in a hectic season at the moment and have only little snatches of time to work in my sketchbook. So having a table garden (a plant or two sitting on my art table) is my way to ensure that when I sit down and face the page and clock (which often says "5 minutes") - I spend no time debating what to draw. It also presents me with a chance to notice little changes in my plant. Create an interesting pattern made out of drawing the same object - like when you draw with a spirograph - the first line usually looks strange but when you make several they start to look like magic. The same is happening with me and drawing the same object several days in a row: I begin to see magic :)

Presenting my January Table Garden Heros: Dark Red Ruffled African Violet! (it needs a repotting so next time you will see it in a completely new light) and "I picked you from the garden trash can" stems of not lavender.

On My Table: Beginning of February 2025.

January was a long month - so many things are happening in all corners of life! But drawing plants, playing with the art supplies (I am organizing my brushes!), and enjoying textures, are a great constant to have during all sorts of times.

Sketches from my Pockets of Time

I enjoy a proper sketching opportunity and have several sets of materials to bring with me on location or paint in my little studio. But as a strong believer in sketching everywhere, I also sketch in any little pockets of time. Knowing this, I carry some options in all of my bags/jackets: a little watercolor kit here, a few markers there, a folded piece of paper in a jacket pocket with two pencils, a pocket sketchbook in my little shoulder bag with a pen, a spiral-bound sketchbook in my backpack, etc. At the beginning of each day (or sometimes at the end of the day), I sit down to add these little sketches into a story that's unfolding in my main sketchbook. Below are a few glimpses of some of these little moments :) 

 

Ocean

Any day you see an ocean is a good one. If you get to sketch it - you are golden.

Here are a few sketches from a recent outing to the beach. 

While I was there I wished for a lot more colors, paints and a larger sketchbook, now that I look at it - I had all I needed - it was a perfect day!

January Treasures

I pick up little treasures everywhere, especially on my walks and hikes. This January was ripe with good walking, and I gathered a nice collection. I keep these in a little envelope at the back of my pocket sketchbooks or in a bag that contains my "always with me" snack (it is a great reason to snack - by the way - to empty the bag :) Some of these I draw on site (while working on that snack), some come with me home, and I draw them when I have a moment. Some days it takes a few hours to find time to draw these, and some of these I found a couple of weeks later - little time capsules of the color and texture tucked in a pocket. I added little sketches and notes from photos and memory to some of these. 

Two Inks: My Winter Colors

I picked up a few new pens while traveling. One was a chisel nib with a lovely gliding feeling - I used it for sketching in Singapore quite a bit, thinking that it was water-proof - but when I tested it home I realized that it is water-resistant at best. Still - it's a joy if you like a quick and quirky line! I am thinking about refilling it with waterproof ink as a test :)

There were two fountain pens, both no-names but custom-adjusted by the owner of the famous Straits Art Store in Singapore. Andrew Tan (Drewscape - who has new Skillshare classes out by the way!) brought me there and introduced me to the store owners and we had a lovely conversation about art materials and urban sketching. I filled these pens only upon my return home because of all the travel and picked brown and blue-gray inks from my collection. One is De Atramentis Document Brown and another one is an old bottle of blue-gray, from an ink company that I cannot recommend but have some leftovers and will finish up before getting new ones. 

And these two colors became my signature winter colors! No matter what I draw (unless it is a crazy "on the go" situation like while moving my parents from one apartment to another when a ballpoint or a dry sharpie from marking boxes is all I have) my hand goes to one of these pens and other colors that I lean into are being curated by this pair. They work with each other, work with other materials but they also fly solo quite well - not boring but more austere. They give me a feeling of profound wintering.

Mary Cassatt as printmaking inspiration (and more!)

San Francisco Legion of Honor hosted a wonderful retrospective of Mary Cassatt "Mary Cassatt at Work" and it was a fantastic experience. I wanted to see in-person works that I knew from books and they as usual elevated my relationship with the art piece because of the level of details that one can see in person and by the experience of looking at an artwork on the wall, in space and imagining the process of making it. I specifically enjoyed looking at the brushstrokes and colors on the edges - away from the well-defined features. 

I did not know what to expect from an announced section of prints but was excited to learn more about printmaking recently and had a companion who was willing to explain and discuss all the intricate nuances of what is innovative in her work, how she did this or that and what we can deduct from these prints and what is still a mystery. Legion of Honor put together a comprehensive article about it with lots of visuals: How-To with the Conservators: Mary Cassatt’s Color Prints by By Christina Taylor, paper conservator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

And a great video about the process:  Demonstrating Mary Cassatt's Color Printmaking Techniques

It would be unfair not to mention some wonderfully colorful and free pastels. And a lot of information about Mary Cassatt: a woman impressionist, the only american in their circle, human, artist, feminist. 

It was so good that we did two takes!

Here are some of my notes from the show.

Drawing with Friends

This year I already had several wonderful chances to draw with other people - exchanging news, ideas, new color loves, various techniques, impressions from different events. Or just drawing side by side or sharing a cup of tea and a quiet moment.

Two quotes from the conversations that happened while I was drawing these portraits:

"you know how you work on something for some time, and then you are done and it is ok - but you want your sketch back? that is where blue line enters". 

"Try this gold. I did not expect it but suddenly there are so many uses for it around me"

Gerald Durrell. And Durrell's Mum - Louisa.

Gerald Durrell is one of my favorite naturalists and authors and I read all his books front to back at some point. I searched through the blog and found out that I almost never mention him and rarely post from my ongoing project "Portraits of my heroes". I keep it on a slow burner but it is a long list of people whose portraits I draw through every year to honor and remember them - and I will share more of them. 

Gerald Durrell was a human whose passion for the animal world continued from a very young age till the end of his life. It brought him to important work of conservation and preservation of wildlife around the world, he traveled the world, met and made friends with thousands of people and animals, and inspired generations of naturalists. His work continues to illuminate our world through Jersey Zoo (note Dodo in the logo) and through the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust. But even more so through his writing which ignites a passion in people of all ages and from all backgrounds and connects them to nature near and far. His ability to tell a story simultaneously funny and full of interesting facts and make me fall in love with an animal I never dreamt I would see in real life is what made me a Durrell fan as a kid. And it continues to this day. 

This past week, on January 7th, was Durrell's birthday and he would have turned 100. I drew these two portraits - of Gerald Durrell and his mother Louisa Durrell - with the super quick addition of some of the animals that first come to my mind when I think about these two people. The story of a pelican and Louisa is always on my mind when I think of what one might consider to be a result of good parenting.

If you never read Durrell's books I suggest starting with "My family and other animals". 

Forest Bathing - My Report on the Holiday Break

Forest Bathing aka Shinrin-yoku is a great way to describe how I spent most of my in-between-holidays time this year: in nature, with minimum connection to the world outside, attending to what I hold dear, in good company. 

I hiked a wide range of landscapes, drew some on location, took naps, tried lots of interesting teas, cooked with new and well-tested recipes both, napped, drew some, looked at the sky a lot. Here are some of the sketches from this break:

Holiday Decorations

This year I got a new holiday tree: it is smaller, made with cheerful tinsel, and gorgeously reflects all the lights it can catch at different times of the day. We put it up with some old decorations (whatever survived a decluttering of the last year) and added a few new experiments too. I tried to draw the silver-ness of the tree and all the ways the light jumped from one sparkly tuft to another. But feel like the tree needs to stay till spring for me to make real progress :) As this is not happening I will have to start again next holiday season!