Forced Time Limit on First Sketch (or my trick of Ten-Minute Warm-Up)

Despite the fact that I have been sketching daily for many years now, I know that the first sketch of the day is always somewhat an interesting snapshot of where I am at the moment on many layers of my life. It is usually an attempt to do all at once, and it is simultaneously filled with many emotions and a wish to step away from them and just look intently. It is usually overworked and rushed at the same time. In short, it is often a disaster - which is exactly why I keep my first sketches. Because they are raw and telling, and because it is a record of that day for me, and sometimes there are gems that only I know about in that first sketch. But if I know that I will have time to sketch for a longer stretch of time, it is very useful for me to get the very first sketch out of the way so that I can actually go past being greedy and throwing everything into "my one chance" and actually take time to look and make choices and change my mind and be ok with that all.

On a recent sketching outing with friends, I declared that the first sketch would be 10 minutes only, and I did it with whatever materials I touched first in my sketching bag, which really helped me to get to some very different sketches later. Scroll for process photos (I knew that my sketching companions would have a hard time sticking to 10 minutes so I had time to take photos - with this post in mind - it is possible that stopping earlier would be good idea:).

Another Vase I Made!

This vase has lots of things that I would do differently today but I learned a lot! See some notes around it :) I names it honey skep. 

Ackerman Pen Revival and Dry Flower Bouquet

I thought I would write a few words about the recent revival of my Ackerman pen. But there is not much to write. I left it without cleaning and with ink inside, some months ago, in a little ziplock bag. I took it out, put it in a water jar for a few minutes while I gathered my supplies. Then I took it apart to refill and just dragged my paper towel through the parts. Re-assembled with ink. And then spent some time coaxing ink out (by gentle tapping and writing - you can see the page where I was doing it on the sketch below. Then I sketched this lovely bouquet of dry flowers collected on my neighborhood walks. And that's basically it. My fingers were very inky after this.

Drawing shadows as a way to look.

One of my favorite ways to break the ice with people who claim that they can never draw anything resembling anything is to offer them to draw a shadow :) It is always better to start with something simple, but complex, like a palm with fingers or a flower. You will need a good source of light (be that a lamp or the sun) - which is a mood booster by itself :) And then you ask them to follow the contour of a shadow - it is a self-explanatory thing - and it does not take long. And then you have a page with a recognizable thing drawn just now! But even for people who do not need a pep-talk and for people who are good or even great at drawing, there is a lot of delight in tracing shadows, be that what you start with or add as a detail for a background. 

For me, shadow is such a different way of looking at an object - it magically opens up dimensions despite actually flattening a 3D object into a 2D view. You can spend some time finding the angle that matches your current whims and follow shadows within shadows if you want more complexity with multiple sources of light. I enjoy collecting shadows when I am in a museum looking at sculptures, and sometimes (for example, on a Ruth Asawa show), objects move, so you have moving shadows to draw! 

This agapanthus was fun to draw, but having that little shadow portrait made that page extra special for me - I understood some mistakes that I made after drawing the shadow too and it gave me more time with the flower - so I noticed more details and now am ready to go back and draw it again :)

My Secret to Using Dip Pen On Location

No matter how many fountain pens I have or try, eventually, I go back to a dip pen - at least for some time. But traveling with a dip pen and using it on location is quite tricky - mostly because of potential ink spills. Over the years I tried several different techniques and this one seems to be my personal top runner:

I use an empty eye drops container, wash it, and fill it with ink. Then I apply ink (a drop or two) directly on the nib of my dip pen - and draw. If there is extra ink on my pen - a touch of the tip of the nib to the hole gets extra ink back into the bottle. With this setup I can draw pretty quickly (even while standing): I hold my tiny bottle in the same hand as my sketchbook and squeeze ink one drop at a time. In some cases, I've drawn with the tip of the bottle itself - or used found objects to use as a pen - all because the ink was available in this convenient way. 

This week I realized that one of my ink bottles stopped working properly as plastic aged and got too rigid - so I no longer could get one or two drops - it is "nothing or gushing" - so I got a new (quite soft) bottle and moved ink into it - here are some photos of the process - click on the image to see it larger.

Tips on Elevating Stress Before Travel

In the days right before the beginning of my recent travel, I was swamped with attempts to close projects on all fronts of my life. My stress showed in my inability to finish things, uninteresting choices in colors and design, snappish dialogue, prolonged conversations with myself about boundaries, multiple versions of to-do lists all over the floor around my table, and very dirty hands from inks after refilling my pens. As you can see - neither making lists (something that I do in any situation) nor refilling pens (a very therapeutic activity under different circumstances) worked. But here is what helped:

1) getting online to chat and draw from a windowswap with a friend - using only my portable printmaking tools. 

2) going out to draw on location - with a very limited set of tools (two markers and my portable printmaking tools). 

Neither of these sketches accomplished what I wanted artistically, but both of these brought me to a much calmer mind state.  And a reminder that limits (on time, materials, and other resources) are a very useful tool. 

My Approach to Anxiety about US Elections

This election season in the United States is complex, hard to navigate, and not easy to live through. Not the first hard election season but probably the scariest so far for me up to now.

I believe that the very idea of democracy surviving in this country is at stake. Autocratic propaganda keeps lying that single votes do not count yet the margins will be slim and every little step in the right direction is a step to keep democracy going. There are many levels on which democracy exists and I think it is important to participate in the democratic process of governance on all the levels that are available for us.

So here are things that are helping me:

1. I do not look at social media as a source of the news. I found several sources for aggregated news from writers that I find balanced and who do a lot of research (I receive one email a day).
2. My other source is www.allsides.com - offers many ways to check sources as much less a sensational source of information.
3. I made sure that I have a local news source - even if you live in a tiny town or if have someone you care about who lives in a small community having that different scale of the news in your input helps to have a different perspective on things.
4. I limit my news consumption in general and try to have a good variety of reading materials ready everywhere. Timer is my friend. 
5. I made sure that I kept tabs on many issues that I care about throughout the whole country, different states, my county, and city - spreading my attention over many important things instead of sinking it all into the results of the presidential race (however important it is).
6. I continue writing letters and donating what resources I have - till the very end. Encouraging people to go vote, make sure that their voice is heard. Sending messages asking people to open their eyes and choose a future in which they are heard and are part of decision-making. I make every card and letter personal. And I enclose my owl "vote" sticker inside :) 
7. And I try to connect to people I know personally - send them a letter, or card or text or place a call - with an unseasonal hello, some news, and a reminder to vote too.
8. I made plans for the election day and days before and after: keeping busy helping people in the community, drawing, and being with people I care about, friends, and connecting to nature. It will be there long after we forget this all.
9. And I voted!

I wish you peace and strength. If you are an American - please vote. For your future, for the future of democracy in this country and in the world.

Gouache outing that needed a follow-up

One of my recent outings to paint on location did not go as I expected. My mind was not on the page and not on the subject, neither was it in my gouache palette or on the perspective plane - and as a result, the page was falling apart on many levels. 

I thought that this was another learning experience and I could just move on. I rarely finish on-location drawings after I leave the place where I paint so it would become a spread in my sketchbook which would either be a "flip faster" point or a good conversation starter. But it somehow kept calling me back - so I added some lines here and there, then more gouache, and then some more crayons. And I think it is now in a better place - so I am posting it here as a reminder to myself that: 

A. It is ok to continue working on things for some time. I can go back and revisit things - after a little distance. It is a strategy I often use when working on illustration projects - why not here?!

B. Not everything can be fixed but some things can be improved and there is joy in both the process and the result and in just making things to be better. 

Here are some process photos and at the very bottom - the resulting image. 

Little trick for protecting your nails against ink stains

Some jobs leave your hands and nails dirty. Sometimes for hours, sometimes for days. Cleaning a fountain pen for example. Painting with your fingers. And many many more. Some people are completely fine with it. Some are not. Some are one thing one day and another on another. Whichever camp you are from - here is a little trick that I (sometimes) remember to do: 

Winter Trip to Spain: Organizing Images, Notes, Sketches and Posts

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:

1. More from the trip (winter 2023-24, Spain)
   1. Sketching Tools that came with me on this trip.
   2. Public Transportation is amazing (sketching people).
   3. Sketching landscapes from a moving train.
   4. Cordoba Part 1
   5. Cordoba Part 2
   6. Seville
   7. Granada
   8. Madrid
   9. Toledo
   10. Museums
   11. Organizing my notes for these posts after the trip - this post :)

Sketching Mode for Super Busy Times: Keep Going Anyways.

During the last 10 days, I did not have a chance to sit down to sketch/draw/paint/work properly - I had only odd ends of waiting here and there. The reasons do not matter as sometimes these things happen: life gets busy, something needs to be done right away. Or routines change, deadlines pile-up, people need you, and priorities seem to scatter all over the place. And the idea of taking proper time to draw looks like a luxury. It is not - and I am working on getting it back into my life. But I thought I would share what tiny bits I did get to put on paper. Just as a record that it was not, indeed, nothing. And a reminder.

Mixing Custom Colors in Acrylic Paint Markers

I enjoy working with acrylic markers as a supportive media - meaning I rarely make a whole drawing with them but their opaqueness and willingness to cover whatever mess I already had on a page make me reach for them more often than not. Between my markers and markers I used for running classes I accumulated quite a collection of colors that were... "not that popular". And then I saw a video where Emma Carlisle was mixing some custom colors in acrylic pens and thought - why don't I try and do that with my existing box of "no way" colors from all sorts of brands? This experiment was quite a success and I got some requests to share my process for making some Custom Color Posca Markers - here it is:

Click on the image to see it larger - it should be readable :)

Persimmons and CMYK experiments with Pentel Pocket Brush Pen

The persimmon season is here and I attack the fruit with my brushes and pens as much as I do with my teeth! Below are some that I scanned already - but there is one sketch I would like to start with:

This image is made with the experimental technique that both Suhita Shirodkar and I are playing with. A limited palette of primary colors (pigmented Higgins inks - Carmine Red, Yellow, and Blue) filled in a pre-cleaned partridge of the pentel pocket brush pens. Plus the standard black cartridge.  

These are water-proof, pretty flat colors that are lovely in little quantities on a page filled with other things but might bore you to death on large surfaces. However, if you add some dynamics with water sprayed on the page, wet mixing, with the dilution of inks, overlaying colors, and using them with pointillism technique varying patterns and brushstrokes - the results are a lot of fun! 

I encourage you to look at what Suhita is making here: More on that triad of inks

Right now I dilute both blue and red - the current proportion is 40% ink, and 60% water but I think I will go to 30:70 on the next refill. Also, I am going to make purple and, possibly, orange pens as stand-alone tools - but continue playing with the CMYK separately. The illustration of these adventures are not scanned yet - so here are some persimmons done with acrylic markers, watercolors, and ink. 

My Tools Update

Here are a few new tools that I am using daily, all recent finds that I would like to share.

The first one is a very nice white paint marker from MICADOR. It was a present and I could not find a link. But it has very nice coverage and I am always looking for a really solid black and really strong white.

Note on the image above - where it does not look so great: the paper in this wonderful Cappuccino Sketchbook from Hahnemuhle has some quirks when I scan it. It is not really suitable for wet media but I know that I can overcome it by accepting some backing and working on different papers to be glued in later. But the color is so inviting - it looks much better in person (not to mention the lovely sleek surface that I am enjoying when I use a nice pen). That slickness is the reason why some materials are acting weird - like this paint marker that suddenly got a metallic shine and more transparency on this paper. 

The second new tool is a removable tape from Scotch. It is a scotch tape that does not damage (so far) my paper when I attach it on the wall and it does not damage my paper when I use it as a masking tape for painting. I find it a little unusual to have transparent masking tape as I paint over it and then have to search by feel to remove it all - but so far the paper is not torn - and that is what counts!

The third new find is a Twist Top Squeeze Bottles (1oz) with Dispensing Caps. I filled one with the glue (that I dilute a bit) and another one with the white gouache - my fourth recent discovery: a caran d'ache white gouache eco.

Having a more liquid than usual material allows me for better coverage on large surfaces and in tight spots - which is helpful with glue. But it is an even bigger win for gouache - actually four wins: 

(1) A paint that is more liquid means easier mixing. 

(2) An ability to work with smaller, more precise, and sometimes more springy brushes. 

(3) It gives me more control over how much paint I add. 

(4) In this container, it means that the paint is not contaminated - white always stays white.

 

This bottle closes securely so I can carry it with me on location and the construction of it is such that dropping it or flipping it over does not result in a spill. 

I can squeeze some fresh paint directly on my palette. 

I can paint with the top opening or make a puddle on the page and then disperse it with some tools or brushes (it feels amazing to push paint with your fingers - give it a try if it's been a while!).

I can apply some paint directly onto my paintbrush. 

I think this little bottle will find a home in many of my kits - might become a sister to my water spray bottle (which as I recently learned, sometimes is called an atomizer).

Current tools and my Hybrid Watercolor/Gouache palette

I prefer writing in my sketchbook to typing hence if you want to know details - click on the image to see it larger.  And if anything in unreadable or needs more info - I will try and answer all questions!

My personal tips and tricks to stay sane on instagram

There is a lot to say about algorithms and social media but I will not go into the vortex of sharing my opinions. I will share some things that help me:

1. I have folders on Instagram and lists on Twitter. 
2. I opt-out of promotional content when possible (aka suggested posts).
3. I made my Instagram stream contain those I follow only.

I had a 4th hack for Facebook, but it is broken now. When I find a way around it, I will post it too. 

And here are detains:

I created lists on Twitter and folders on Instagram. There I collect people or posts by the subject matter. For example, I have a list of the "epidemic-related" accounts on Twitter. And another one for local news. I collect things that inspire me in another thread. On Instagram, I have a folder where I save things that I want to draw, and another one, with humor/cartoons. There is a folder for everything I want to save related to the war in Ukraine. I collect quotes/expressions that I want to remember or find interesting to talk to people about. There is a folder for color. Materials. Recipes. Books. Music. And many others. The idea is that a) I can find things that I saved b) I can get a dose of tailored inspiration - and there is a finite amount of stuff there.

Opting out and de-personalizing targeted ads is a multi-step process and it is changing often - the proper way to do this is to do a research and adjust settings on your phone etc. But a simple (and very powerful - at least for the short run) thing that you can do is next time when you see a "suggested post" in your stream of posts on instagram - in the upper right corner of that post tap three vertical dots and opt out.

And the best present is adjusting your stream to those you follow only - in the app on your phone, on the hole screen there is an instagram logo in the upper left corner. Tap on it once and a n arrow appears to the right form the logo. Tap it and choose "following" - I think you will need to do it every time you restart your application. But this converts your stream to a chronological collection of things posted by the people you actually followed. Here is a screenshot that might help:

Some tools that I am playing with in my sketchbook

 

Flowers in between other things and oil pastel experiment.

My last sketchbook had several projects going but in between I tried to draw my flowers - here they are. The last sketch is an experiment with using oil pastels in my sketchbook. I love oil pastel as much as I hate smudging it so it was an attempt to find a solution to both feelings. And I think I found it - good (non-smelling) fixative is an answer but it should be sold with a nice pack of patience. 

 

Layers upon layers, mistakes and approaches.

I've tried to write about my practice of layering things in my sketchbook several times now. Every time the number of images and words gets to a point when I throw everything away to start over. 

So this image and this post are opening a new page in my search for a solution: after this, I will write one thing at a time - so there will be a bunch of separate posts, and then perhaps I will be able to put them into comprehensive version.