People Drawing!

I love drawing people - moving people, working people, sleeping people, faces. One of my regular outlets is portrait parties in real life or online - like pencils4tea and drawingisfree. But I've been skipping a lot of them lately - so when there was a chance to jump on a zoom call and draw some faces, I did so without hesitation. And what fun I had! The music (used to time each portrait) was super funny (some sitters had a really hard time not laughing :) Of course, my favorite was chicken singing one of the songs from the movie Frozen! In short - I should do it more often ;)

Here are some of the previous people drawings I did not share before - I only recently realized that I've been posting more of these on Instagram, so this is a little catch-up. 

Flanders Poppies in a Landscape

It is impossible to translate all the feelings a field of poppies gives. I enjoyed painting separate flowers and groups of flowers, but something was missing in what I was trying to say. That is when I knew that I had to try and paint a bigger view - and what a joy it was!

I found some dogwood flowers!

I missed my "scheduled" dogwood tree blooming time (and ended up enjoying an early season Pride of Madeira - so no loss!) But then I realized that there is a rather tall group of dogwood trees near my library - and they are very late bloomers every year - so perhaps I was not that late after all?

Flanders Poppies 2026 - Part 2

Follow-up on the last week's post about my trip to paint Flanders Poppies: more gouache plein air ! 

Little Things Here and There

These are little sketches that fit between larger sketches in my sketchbook. Mostly "this is a super busy day! let me draw whatever is in front of me on my table, otherwise I might not find time to draw today" :)

Another Vase I Made

This was my second time when I was able to make a closed form on the wheel (you make a cylinder and then you make sure that it has no opening at the top). I let it dry some and made a hole for the entrance to the vase. This clay is gritty, rough, and strong, yet when completed, this little piece looked very gentle. I put some grasses from around my home in it before giving it as a gift to a friend :)

On My Table: Beginning of May 2026

April ran away from me - but I 

• enjoyed working on sharing my underwater drawing tips and tricks with a bunch of people online.
• witnessed one of the most abundant rose-blooming season in my neighborhood, and now I even have a rose in a pot! 
• marveled at the late California rains and the sudden greenery of the hills after them
• made a bunch of pots and vases
• finished a sketchbook number 164
• painted outside at least once every week!
• worked on a bunch of graphic design projects and projects that are at the stage where progress seems super slow and there is nothing to share, but I know that it will change.

Flanders Poppies 2026 - Part 1

Flanders Poppies are on my sketching calendar in May usually but since the heat wave we had this year (I know I keep complaining about everything blooming at the wrong time) I went to check the "House with Red Poppies" earlier than usual and found a field in full bloom!

This year I got to chat with the master of the poppies himself and got an invitation to check out his other crops later this year - so now the "house with red poppies is in my calendar twice! 

As you probably already guessed, more sketches are coming because there is no way to paint so much red beauty in just one sitting, but I need breaks between such colorful excursions too :)

I Mave a Vase

A few months ago, I went to a wheel-throwing class, and little by little, I got hooked :)  I've been trying to write this post forever because of how much there is to say about this activity by itself and how it fits into my practice. But since the big overview is taking forever, I decided to start by drawing some of my clay experiments and sharing them here :) 

The first vase appeared on my blog in the post with the bouquet of roses.

And here is a second vase:

For those affected with pottery bug: this vase was thrown on a wheel with speckled buff clay, I used green underglaze (UG38 - Key Lime) and then after first firing applied some wax resist and had satin white glaze inside and light blue outside. 

Bike and Sketch

I rode my bike and stopped to sketch along the path. It was a good day to be out. Some process photos below. 

This was a little more bike and sketch outing where bike works as a means to get to a sketching spot. As opposed to I go for a run or bike ride and sketch when I stop by for a quick rest / stretch. The inspiration for the expansion comes from Pedal&Paint outings by Mike Dutton, who is making very atmospheric and inspiring movies about his bike and paint process. 

Urban Garden: Two Sketches From The Same Spot

I sat down to paint an urban succulent jungle on a street in San Jose. It looked like a place where one can spend a vacation drawing plants. It was perfect. But also overpowering. I cut some stencils and made a plan, but got so overwhelmed by everything green that I saw that the only way for me to keep going was to start another sketch on the same spread of the sketchbook and keep switching back and forth. Luckily for me, there was a Jacaranda tree available for sketching - first one this year!

Trees in Bloom: Pears and Cherries That Bear No Fruit

Right before the super hot spell we had in March, I had a chance for a quick sketch of super white pear trees on google campus.

As that hot spell moved all the blooming schedules for this year forward, I found myself painting Japanese Flowering Cherry much earlier than I expected.

Neither this cherry nor this pear bears fruit, which might be a gift or a curse depending on your point of view. But the flowers are amazing, and I was overwhelmed by the complexity of trying to show these trees at their peak in both cases. With the first sketch, my solution was to get far away and see the trees as a part of a much bigger scene, and limit the amount of time I allocated for this sketch. With the flowering cherry trees, I decided to drop the building in the background to enjoy the grays and pinks of the tree against the greens of the shrubbery and grass.