“Piecing It All Together” I and II will be a part of “My Home Town” show at the Keizer Art Association gallery.
Show will be up September 3 – 29, 2026.
Address: 980 Chemawa Road NE, Keizer, OR.
My little drawing has been sold at the Twitter Art Exhibit’s opening night in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. The wonderful curator for #TAE20, Debanjana Bhattacharjee, gave it a permanent happy home!
The 10th Twitter Art Exhibit that this year is helping Horry County Disabilities & Special Needs. Watch the opening ceremony here: https://www.twitterartexhibit.org/live.
It’s always takes a lot of work to organize a big art show, but this year is extra challenging because of the pandemic and many uncertainties that came with it. I am very grateful for everyone who volunteered their time and talent to help with #TAE20.
The 2021 call for artists just opened, and a new cycle of creating and helping has began! I can’t wait to be a part of it again.
Got a word yesterday that my 12 x 16 cm drawing made it to the 10th Twitter Art Exhibit that this year is helping Horry County Disabilities & Special Needs.
The show was going to be held in Myrtle Beach, SC but is now in limbo due to the COVID-19 outbreak. I do hope that there still be an option to buy the cards online like in previous years, no matter what the fate of the live show. Then we still do good and all is as well as it can be.
Every volunteer who helped with the show is very much appreciated, as are many artists who sent in their little creations.
The blacks are ink, all shades of gray are charcoal including grays over blacks. I hoped for a different result, but it’s just a small sketch, so not a big deal. I will get where I want with the next version.
A somewhat failed experiment with charcoal on top of soft pastels – I was aiming for a little different, more dramatic look. Apparently a workable fixative is not capable of holding even a thin amount of pastel in place, and it keeps mixing with charcoal. I wonder what would work better?
What it looked like half-way through:
My first semi-serious attempt to do a more than a rudimentary sketch in ArtFlow app. You know what’s the best part of working in it? It saves all changes automatically and seemingly in real time, at least I haven’t lost anything yet. And I think if I ever hit the limit on the number of layers in the file it will be my phone’s fault, not the app’s.
A kind visitor at the third weekend of recent Open Studios came up with the title, not me. I often draw during SVOS. People like to see how art is created, and whatever I am working on easily becomes a conversation piece. Sometimes I get a free benefit of getting stuff named for me.
As usual, the ATC exchange at CAG today was a lot of fun. Here are my contributions to the event:
I love how the fall edition of the ATC exchange happens around my Birthday. This year it’s on a day before, so I got four early Birthday gifts:
Here is my newest tiny digital canvas. I haven’t done any for a few months and completely forgot my past experience with colored pencil on this kind of surface. It is a bit slippery and does not allow to build up really dark darks unless you carefully plan for them from the beginning and use very sharp pencils all the time. Unlike with paper or traditional linen canvas it is not possible to start with lighter colors everywhere and then go darker in as many layers as necessary. Darker colors on a digital canvas start to chip off relatively quickly if you are not careful.
So with a refreshed memory, I am now going to use digital canvas with soft graphite pencils only and leave colors to linen ones. Or maybe it’s worth trying to gesso a digital canvas and see if it becomes more tolerant to dark colored pencils.
The original miniature ($35.00) is available in my Miniatures online gallery.
Into the Woods (Miniature) – colored pencil on canvas, 3.5" x 2.5"
The original miniature ($35.00) is available in my Miniatures online gallery.
This is my latest miniature partly inspired by a very cold and snowy winter of 2011-2012 and partly made because right now here in California it’s overly warm and sunny even by local standards. In the process of bringing winter closer to me I found out that a digital canvas can take a fair amount of scraping with x-acto knife which is pretty convenient for putting snow over heavily darkened areas.
The original is available in my Miniatures online gallery for $35.00
I am pleased to announce that both my pieces submitted to the Art Under $200 exhibit at the Pacific Art League have been accepted.
You probably saw this one already:
And this is a new artwork that was not shown anywhere else yet:
The opening reception for the exhibit will be a part of the Palo Alto First Friday, on December 6th, 2013, from 5:30 pm till 8:00 pm.
The exhibit will stay open till December 24th.
Pacific Art League is located at 668 Ramona St, Palo Alto, CA 94301.
Open Monday – Friday from 9:00 am till 5:00 pm
This is another piece in the “small landscapes” series that was started long time ago, survived a two year interruption, and is finally getting done. It’s always difficult to pick the pencils again when you almost don’t remember what you had in mind in the beginning. But as a nice exception to the rule, this little drawing was finished relatively easily. It was almost all about playing with colors and almost no struggling through the process.
The first piece in the series was Open Space, and if all goes well there will be three more.
The original ($140.00), greeting cards, and prints are available in my Pastel Pencil online gallery.
I have so many pieces in progress that each one seems to be a never ending drawing journey. It’s good to switch gears between subjects and media all the time, but at the same time I would really love to finish at least something already. So, a something finally got finished:
The original is available in my Miniatures online gallery for $35.00
Looking back at all my attempts to make colored pencils play nice with the digital canvas, I have to admit that they certainly prefer a traditional linen one. So the blank digital canvases that I still have will be used for other media. For example, a graphite pencil:
Miniature – graphite pencil on canvas, 3.5″ x 2.5″
Things learned with this one:
– only soft graphite works, harder grades scrape the priming off the canvas without leaving noticeable marks
– for blending, small sponge makeup applicators and bristle brushes work best
– common erasers are of little help when you need a highlight or to scrape off a mistake, but kneaded eraser works wonderfully (I am using a Koh-i-Noor Hardtmuth eraser that comes with its own case and like it better than other brands I had before)
– an x-acto knife can be good for small bright highlights, but using it requires care because it easily gets deep into priming and scrapes it off
– areas treates with a x-acto knife are still good for blending tools, but pencil marks behave unpredictably, so better be avoided
My other canvas experiment that is yet to be finished is a mix of the black India ink and graphite. I am not sure how I like the result so far, but we’ll see.
Sunshine, light clouds, and blue skies – everything our weather at the moment is not. I do not mind misty and rainy one single bit, but somehow it is not what I want to draw.
pastel pencil, 5″ x 7″
The original ($140.00), greeting cards, and prints are available in my Pastel Pencil online gallery. The original went to a new good home!
