Sketching, Illustration, Design and Everyday Life.
Copyright by © Nina Khashchina except where noted.
I started posting about my recent trip to Spain without a plan or organization and pretty quickly became overwhelmed and discouraged since there were so many things I wanted to remember, share, and draw from photos or memories or my sketches... but only so many hours in a day exist and time started to slip away and with it, my memories and enthusiasm started to fade. But I found a way back and this post is for my future self - here is how to not do everything at once :) 
As you can see I put together a rough map of what I wanted to talk about and roughly connected that to what images I had defined as most important to remember what I wanted to tell. Added some screenshots of scans and photos, some notes, and connected those to my mind map - and very soon things started to line up in order. Here are posts about this trip:
The school year is upon us and I am catching up on scanning and posting about summer filled with lots of sketching and biking and all sorts of adventures around our home.
This was a lovely outing on a very bright and rather hot day in July - and another page from my A3 Sketchbook #150 (some of the previous adventures of this sketchbook can be found by the #Sketchbook150 tag on this blog), painted with gouache on location. Sketching from a shade helped but taking a photo of the process was a nightmare - as you can see from some examples below. I am still yet to identify the purple bush - which I think calls for another visit to this place to make another sketch - perhaps when the seasons change?
I wanted to do something big for the nice round number of 150 - after all, it comes only once! (just like 149 and 151 ;) But the truth is I wanted to do some larger works this summer, and choosing an A3 sketchbook was a simple way of making sure that I would stick to my plan.
A3 means it is at least twice larger than my usual sketchbook. A3 means that my backpack does not close so when I bend down sketchbook hits me on the head. A3 means that wind can get the book out of my hands. It also means some giant pain in terms of sharing images - scanning this beast takes both time and skill. There is quite a bit of cursing while I work in this sketchbook because everything is different at this scale and sometimes I want to just paint and draw and not solve a new puzzle. But I am enjoying the ride (most of the time :)
Here is the result of the very first outing with the sketchbook #150: Matilija Poppies are such an amazing subject to struggle with!
btw: I filled another A3 sketchbook almost exactly three years ago and finally made a little video of all the pages. Here is a post about it - with a link to the video.
I had an amazing time sketchnoting (visual representation of the verbal delivery of content or exchange of ideas). during the event at the biotechnology company, DayTwo.
I drew live during the presentations and meetings and used both analog and digital formats to capture my notes with words and, more importantly - images. Analog sketchnoting was done on large paper and digital form became some images and short animations which summarize the content of the meeting in a fast and easy-to-digest form. Here is an example of the characters that appeared in my illustrations of the meetings.
I also personalized some swag for the participants of the events.
We finished our adventure in the kitchen of a @charlesvollmar - a popular chef of Epicurean Exchange. The team, led by Chef Charlie, created a wonderful spring Italian meal and I sketched them as they worked. The result was a concertina sketchbook filled with the team busy preparing a dinner and a wonderful feast which we shared to celebrate the end of the event.
I like making my sketchbook covers special! Sometimes it happens at the very beginning, sometimes I add stickers, glue, and paint on the cover as I work in them. And sometimes it is something that I do as a way to say goodbye to a sketchbook - like it was with the latest one - Sketchbook # 141 - with a crocodile!
I tried making crocodiles cute and I tried to make them scary, I tried to make them thoughtful and humorous - but they turned out to be what they wanted and only a handful of these I like:
I am making a series of illustrations with animals that come up in my conversations with my parents. Many of these start while we are talking so I end up with many versions - some of them even become stickers - see my latest sketchbook cover below!
Somehow tapirs got a lot of votes! Text on the page says: With the nose like this one you cannot be a carnivore", Mom.
And another page contains parts of our conversations about the war - during our video call.
I will have to come back to the Komodo dragon - this one looks too sweet I think but based on what I read they are pretty serious creatures and I want to draw a proper representation of the komodo character!
One of the projects that I wanted to make this year was a series of animal illustrations. I spent some time trying to decide whether I will make an alphabet or just some number, whether animals will be chosen by geography or classification or books I read, or some other obscure or thorough research reasoning. And with all these preparations I haven't started on this project yet - until I realized that in my conversations with parents we often talk about different animals. This is how I will make my list now :)
So here is the first one: Kangaroo.
As I continue making my Flower Alphabet for Inktober this year, I have a lot of little bits and pieces that look like a mess and a promise at the same time. And, inevitably, all this detritus makes its way into my other projects and into my sketchbook.
Things that were happening in February, things that will happen in March - sketches, notes, doodle pages used as protectors in my sketchbook (gouache smudges if you carry your sketchbook everywhere and surprisingly enough even these days I carry it a lot!). Masking tape to mark area on my table for the video I was recording.
Inktober is always an experiment for me. This year I wanted to explore a bunch of techniques to make a huge mess but have some control over it. I decided to make a bunch of spontaneous ink blobs and crazy brush strokes, explore some printing techniques, and revive some experiments that I left unfinished last year. I made a list of options and then I made a plan. And then abandoned/adjusted and transformed it on the go. But having a plan was crucial to enjoying the process and making it without a glitch through all 31 days.
My plan had two pillars: structure and maintenance.
Structure:
Maintenance:
Next, I started working and almost every day I would change something :) I sincerely thought that I would put all my notes on how I did my inktober illustrations in this post but now that I uploaded them all in one place and looked back - it is impossible to list every single step/technique/experiment - some I don't even remember!
Here are somethings that I do remember:
And after I was done with my inktober illustrations I would normally make a variation of it (and post it with the original) and with many I kept going making more versions on the same theme, writing notes on what I like or what worked or did not work - next to my usual daily sketchbook notes. It was a great month of experimentations!
You can find all the original inktober illustrations:
https://blog.apple-pine.com/search/label/inktober%202020
You can find all of my inktober explorations from 2020 in this folder on Flickr:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/23173190@N07/albums/72157716834569008
