Slippers

When I was trying them on in the shop, these slippers felt so comfortable and looked so ugly.
The practicality won, and I bought them.
But when I combined them with my cotton polka dot socks, the overall ugliness became the source of inspiration.

Flowers

The purity of acrylic colors makes me the slave of this media.
This sketch was inspired by balcony flowers and made with acrylic paint I bought last summer for "paint on glass" experiments. Surprisingly, paint survived almost a year, but is slowly getting thicker, which is good, as thickness adds texture and bad, as I have to speed up with sketches before paint'll dry out completely.

Summerhouse

View from the upper floor at my parent's summerhouse.

Today TV reminded me about one of the favorite Russian movies of my childhood, "The City of Craftsmen".
It is fairy tale, good people struggle and win over evil.
And only today I saw with new eyes the strongest role of the art director in this movie, Alexander Boim, his work of pen and pencil (no 3D-renderers in 1965!) is amazing.

Link to movie here, in case you are want to look at it, too.
http://youtu.be/wYdKuU47zDo

Worn Out

Worn out. It's about the boots near the entrance door and about me.
"Earthed" or "grounded"? Which word does explain better the state of mind when wings are very short and weak?
I,m slowly getting back to normal from office work and make myself draw more regularly.  I hope very much drawing will help me to grow the wings as it always did help before.

I want to share this blog with you. AnnamariaArt (click here). Annamaria and her art teaches me shapes and composition and inspires on daily basis.

Kitchen

These days I prefer dumb internet browsing to actual drawing and painting. I hope this is only temporary laziness and apathy after very intense and time consuming office work.  
The choice of the model for this sketch is very in tune with my current mood: squares, triangles, rectangles and muted colors..
I am so glad to see that the spring is singing in your art, friends!

Sketch inspired by www.thekitchn.com

Hyachinth

Two hyacinths sketches are here to glorify the spring.

Bread Baskets

Quick sketch of the window-sill decoration in the cafe. If you do not recognize the items, they are glass vase with dry petals, glass vase in the shape of light bulb, tea pot and two bread-baskets made of withe (he-he-he, good idea to explain realistic drawing in words, isn't it?)

Onions

My aunt put it straight: "It is time for onions!" And planted three onion bulbs into the flower pot on window -sill. She can not plant them outdoors, it is -12C and show mountains are high out there. Her personal protest action against winter.

It is acrylics (for glass and ceramics, bought in the summer and getting thicker in plastic cans - which explains the texture) in my sketchbook.

Kitchen

The photo of this kitchen was found at "The Kitchn" blog (here). I was charmed by the simplicity and variations of shapes.

Experiments with Acrylic Paint

Still almost no time for drawing so I show you today my sketches done quickly on windowsill before the sun gone away.
Upper photo is my experiment with acrylic colouring of drawing done on dry paper with black ink.

The second photo is my attempt to copy the small house in snowy park I saw on my way home.

Today I read in Darleen's blog that she is hooked on "Shameless".
My TV hook these evenings is every minute of 22 minutes episodes of  old "Taxi" with Andy Kaufman and Danny DeVito. It is so funny and kind, it feels like fresh air for me during these busy and fast days. 



What are your TV favorites?

Fish on Red

This painting is inspired by A Nos Pinceaux blog, one of my favorite blogs of art challenges. Evhe posted the photo of fish in the basket at French market in summer 2012, but only this February I could get to the image, stuck deep in my head for all this time.

Today I test web-service IFTTT. It is very simple, in comparison with its complex name. Now, when post is ready and I push  "Publish" in my favorite Blogger, the post will be automatically duplicated in Tumblr, Flickr and Facebook. Of course you can duplicate manually (if you are interested to do it at all). But I always considered and proved with my actions that laziness is the main engine of progress.
I look forward to see how if it works.

And now my short notes about latest reading discoveries.
"I Remember Nothing" by Norah Ephron seemed full of banal and obvious statements when I started the book. But when I finished everything was different. Book is so wise and simple in a way when "simple" means experience and depth of  talented, clever, funny and wise 69 years old woman, dying of cancer and knowing it.

Another book is "Art and Fear" by David Bayles and Ted Orland.  It is about fears and doubts living in a head of the creator, about rivalry and originality. The book helped to realize that my reflections about artwork are on one wave with many artists - painters, writers, musicians, and that fear and doubt are serious enemies, but they can be overcome.

Hospital Building

I made a photo of this beautiful building in the summer and at last sketched it at home.
But so far when driving around the building of this hospital, I have plans to be back in the spring for the plein-air.

Recently I have watched "The Hobbit" (to tell the truth, I was forced to, I neither read Tolkien, nor watched other movies of "the Ring" series). It was too noisy and too straightforward for my taste, but the king of gnomes was very handsome and this fact helped me to get to the end of the performance.

Weeks passed, but I continued to recall one character of the movie, Gollum, as symbol of duality, of incompatible characters coexisting inside one person. 
And I recognized something about myself in Gollum. Often happens, that you are calm, benevolent and positive and suddenly, under influence of unexpected change of circumstances or stress, the beast inside you wakes up. And voila! he is the boss, he pays no attention neither to education, nor to experience, nor to rules of society. And then suddenly, unexpectedly, it is hidden back. And you are back to your normal, peaceful self again.
Is this duality familiar to you? In yourself or your relatives or friends?

Birds Feeding

This tomtit and its two relatives come flying every day to my balcony to eat.

I have made a feeding rack from 5litres plastic bottle, having cut out windows in it and having plastered edges with adhesive tape (what if the edges are too sharp for little birds' legs???) and hung out the rack out of the balcony.

The basic dish - raw sunflower seeds mixed with pearl barley (I read somewhere that tomtits like pearl barley but my visitors do not look too happy with it). And a slice of bacon on a chain turned out to be the most favored dessert.
Considering their activity and frequency of  visits, soon the windows of the bottle will be too small for these gourmets. 

Figures of Posemaniacs.com

Posemaniacs.com is always there to help us with figure drawing.

Q 10

I have recently discovered and want to share the text editor program, Q10. Here. It is free and simple and small. And it has clear interface and it inspires you to write, to create letters, words, sentences. You can (as I did) save it to usb-flesh drive (it can be portable) and write text, poem, novel, thoughts, ideas, diary - whatever hits you, in most comfortable way and in your language.
That's the monitor screen when you start (It looks so fresh and distraction-free after overloaded pages we get used to). I took image here.

Of course I consider piece of paper and pen to be the best text editors ever, but still, Q10 is good.

My illustration today shows the cafe corner where we met with my friend two weeks ago, made with ink and 2 neocolor sticks, cobalt blue and burnt sienna.

Time Management

How is your relationship with time going? Mine is difficult, time is accelerating.

Here my strategy and tactics for time management:
- A "must follow" schedule of my activities on weekly basis. It includes most of the aspects: family, work, development, movement, entertainment, rest. Mind map (here) is great help in making the list, it really wakes up my mind.

- A table, with empty columns, where I enter my activities in half hour periods. That is where I see the "lost" time and the "found" time. I made it in Excel and print weekly: I keep Saturday always empty it is my day of freedom.
- A timer, my best assistant. Time of a hard work takes turns with time of rest. Now it is 45+15, but depending on amount of work ad obligations, it can change. Timer installed into my mobile phone suits perfectly, mechanical timer works fine, too:

- Internet, my weak link. I use internet during the day for my office needs without limits. But I may visit Blogger, Google reader, Livejournal, Facebook only during time limited by my browser (I will go into details later, links work from 21-30 till 24-00).

After a month of using this method I can see where my time goes. It turns out that my day is not so bad and chaotic, as it seemed to me earlier.
There is still one unsolved problem, the speed of my personal time. I mean the situation, when task which I carried out earlier for half an hour, now requires hour, and even an one and a half. Certainly, it maybe my aging. And I am glad to confirm any theory, except to to admit that the reason is my age.

My illustrations today are the last sketches from the trip to Georgia: the view of the window in my aunt's house and the stock of red wines and pumpkins in her kitchen.

More Sketches from Georgia

My love affair with blogging began in 2009. It had a very energetic start.
At first I landed at Russian blogworld with my genius artworks. But Russian blogworld was not happy at all to see me, it was inhospitable, aggressive and critical. So I wandered into the English-speaking network. And that is where mutual love happened at first sight.
Do I need to tell you about this love? You know everything by yourselves. Understanding, generosity, a gold mine of ideas, we became connected and linked and this experience was priceless.

But at some point, my bloglife became too much in time and obligations: The time and obligation to post daily pictures in MoscowDailyPhoto, the time to see and comment new posts of my friends (and I now have over 500 subscriptions in Google reader), the time and obligation to thank you for your attention to my blog. I have driven myself into the corner, trying to be everywhere and catch everything. I was tired and new posts of friends and acquaintances began to cause irritation. And my comments, usually thougthful and emotional, moved into the category of "Cool!" and "Great work!" sort of comments.
And the most unpleasant thing was my free time, invaluable for drawing, was spent on internet browsing with hundreds of photos scrolling, killing time and my eyes. I did not want to paint, why to bother, when it was so nice to watch the paintings done by my new friends?

So I decided to stop and have a rest. And now, two months later, I am planning changes in my blogging manner and comeback of my free time, my desire to draw and recovery for my eyes.  
- Forgive me if I am much less likely to appear on your pages.

- Forgive me, if the vector of my blog will be less focused on drawing.

- Forgive me if I do not respond to your comments and feel free to not comment in my blog.
- And forgive me for such a long letter. I promise that it would not happen again.I really love you. I am very grateful to you for your attention, warmth, strength, kindness and joy that you give me.

I'm so inclined to win myself back. 
 In the next post I will write what medications I take from Internet addiction, perhaps this experience will be useful to someone of you.

Back to Blogging

Jvary is the church of 7th century near Tbilisi, Georgia (Wiki link here). It is constructed on top of mountain and overlooks the place where two rivers meet. It is so breathtaking beautiful!

I was in Georgia on my winter holidays, more sketches from the trip to follow.

Photo by Jemal Kasradze (www.jemalkasradze.blogspot.com)

How were you the month passed?
My interruption from blogging was so useful. I allowed myself to have a rest, to stop and to think about my weblife and how it affected my real life. I will be happy to share my "deep thoughts" in my next posts and hope that my experience will be useful to you too. 
  

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

My dear friends!

Happy holidays to you and yours! I wish you to be healthy, full of joy and creativity, active, passionate and productive!

I miss you so much and feel so thankful for your kindest feedback, despite of my silence and lack of reaction to your nicest comments. 

I hope to be back soon to enjoy and study your blogs, full of ideas and talent.

Happy Holidays!

December in Sketchbook

How are you? How are your creative spirit and holiday preparations? I hope you are fine and full with energy and ideas.

Here are my few sketches of December, I hope I will have more time for drawing and painting soon.