All Posts re: Bonaire 2025:
Sketching, Illustration, Design and Everyday Life.
Copyright by © Nina Khashchina except where noted.
Showing posts with label plants. Show all posts
Showing posts with label plants. Show all posts
Trip to Bonaire: Plants
Before my trip, I thought, "I am not entirely sure how anything grows on Bonaire, so I do not think I will need to worry about greens. I was so, so wrong! Even these few sketches of plants will tell you a different story, and they do not do justice to the greens you might see on the island! And there are regular rains and a forest on the island! The sounds of palm trees were one of my favorite sounds during this trip, and they were the only plants with adequate shade to sketch :)
Community Art Showing.
Some time ago I put up my works in the my local community center - and just recently I had a chance to update it to show some new projects:
Hills of Los Altos
Poppies of Palo Alto
Birds of the World - I am still on the owls but more on the way!
Here is how some of these look in the space:
Rattlesnake Calathea Needs Repotting!
My Rattlesnake Calathea (also known as Spot) needs repotting, so it was moved to my work table. However, there was no time for the repotting work to happen. Nevertheless, close proximity to my sketchbook means that I got to sketch a few portraits :) The first one was supposed to be a direct watercolor that went so wrong that I was about to write a whole page listing what was wrong exactly. But then I had a phone call with friends and kept adding and subtracting things, and it ended up in a pile of examples of why continuing to work on things is a good practice.
The second one just happened to be a super quick value study.
And the third one I enjoyed making with my printmaking tools!
Which one is your favorite?
Drawing Orchids - continuation.
After my initial attempt to draw orchids I tried to understand them several more times. Some of these are stages of the same page in my sketchbook - I rarely go back to "fix" things but these flowers were asking for it!
I never know if orchid is real or fake.
I always avoided orchids - both as plants and subjects for my drawings. To thrive for a long time they require greener thumbs than I have. And to draw them I had to believe that they were real and not plastic - they always look artificial to me :)
But recently I was exposed to a different approach: think about orchards as a long-lasting bouquet / composition - not as a living plant. And with this thought in mind, my parents got two lovely orchards as presents. Personal exposure to the roots and leaves allowed me to believe that these are real plants and not fake ones and I ended up drawing them :) With real pleasure - not a fake one :)
Morning of experiments turned into plant portraits
I've been working out some problems in my sketchbook and ended up with these three portraits of the same plant that is a part of a garden on my work table. The problems require more work to get to a new place - but I can say for sure I am enjoying some interesting combinations of materials here. This is Spot - a Rattlesnake Calathea.
Plants update in gouache, printmaking and CMYK.
I got some new plants recently and this is a quick update on them - though since I sketched these there was some development and some leaves were lost. But I am working on figuring out why this happened and sketching all that fell, all that it left - basically, all.
All three of these are made with different tools that I am enjoying working with: some printmaking with stencils and collages, some gouache with spattering and lettering dome with flex nib dipped in gouache, and my CMYK pens.
I have a new plant
This is Rubik. It is a ruby rubber tree or ruby fig tree. But it is small now and I hope it will like it on my table. So far it lost one leaf and I cannot get it to be shiny but the patterns on the leaves are driving me to draw it often! This is an acrylic markers version.
What is on my table?
* Timer. This is one of the main wisdom of my life: time needs to be measured and recorded. I use the times when I am on the roll, I use it when I am in a rut. Here is how it works: turn it on - just for 5 minutes if that is all you can or all you have - and do something without interruption, without switching to other things, without questioning. Then do it again. Especially useful in the current situation.
** A little while ago I realized that I love my materials and hoard them a bit but don't use them as much as I could. As a result, I do not get as much joy out of them and feel guilty for spending money and for taking space and time on picking them. But if I get my joy out of them - there is no guilt and there is art. Here is my current solution: I created these two boxes. I put all my pens in box number one. And after I drew with a pen I would move it to box number two. This way I started rotating through all my pens, realized that some I can let go because I don't want to come back to them but others I love and I forgot about some of my pens completely! Now I go through everything in box #1 and then move all the pens out of #2 into #1 and start all over.
I am working on somewhat similar solutions for other materials - I will try to take a picture soon.
Sketchbook #113: Lilac and Look at My Sketchbook in Unedited format.
I was super excited to find first lilac of the season in March and spent some time sitting by the bush and painting. People were passing me by and one of them made a comment and then did not go away. This happens sometimes - people hang around as I work and I usually don't pay attention. But then this guy started working on the bush and I realized that this is HIS LILAC :) We started talking, he shared some info about hummingbirds nests that were on my mind lately and I ended up getting a couple of amazing branches as a present :)
My sketchbooks live in my bag and get quite a bit of beating, in addition to this I like to keep all my sketches in the same place - so I end up taping / glueing / sticking in /making envelopes etc. to keep everything in one place. This is why my sketchbooks sometimes look like this (this is an unedited scan) :)
I will try and make a video flipping through some of them soon :)
My sketchbooks live in my bag and get quite a bit of beating, in addition to this I like to keep all my sketches in the same place - so I end up taping / glueing / sticking in /making envelopes etc. to keep everything in one place. This is why my sketchbooks sometimes look like this (this is an unedited scan) :)
I will try and make a video flipping through some of them soon :)
Sketchbook #112: Found Flower and Dealing with Mistakes
I try to separate the process of making form the process of critiquing my work but sometimes there is no way around it - something just looks wrong on so many levels even before I finished it. That was the case with these flowers - I was not patient enough to really draw the structure and colors were not right and values too... That is when I decided to make a new layer and make a line the main character of this page. And used pencil for it. Not only pencil over gouache brings me joy - which immediately helped my attitude, but actually, it helped me to slow down and adjust some previous decisions to make this a more interesting sketchbook page and richer memory.
Sketchbook #111: Treasures - Acorn Collection
There are many kinds of oak trees in California and I've been trying to learn about them for a while. This year my acorn collection grew and I'm going to take a more systematic approach and keep all acorns I collect from squirrels until I positively ID them :)
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