This week was tough. I am officially a very greedy person. Daily projects for this month include: art journal, embroidery, watercolor challenge, lettering challenge, 100 days project- color studies. Weekly challenges: assignments from MATS course, twice a week pastel work, sketchflashmob, 52 weeks illustration challenge and I am still working on posters for kids’ choir. I had to abandon book project for now, or rather put on hold. I wasn’t going to fit into timeframe anyway…and I want to do a good job on it.

Anyway….

Let’s see how this week played out.

Pastel (See all on instagram under #greenrainartpastels)

My husband’s birthday was on April 1st and I prepared a pastel painting for his gift. Our most beloved city, I had so much fun drawing it. Although it was so so hard because of the way the bridge is…

I made a relatively small drawing for artofpastels challenge. The pastoral scene felt so right on a snowy (!) April day and I pushed myself by working on a smaller scale, nowhere to spread.

I also did a painting of daffodils.

It’s been a year since my first pastel “success”- by success I mean no smudges from my hand and recognizable shape. I wanted to see the difference. The truth is that after this more or less successful pastel drawing I abandoned the material (save for a couple of not so bad pastel pencils sketches) and didn’t touch it for another 5 month, so really it’s more like 6 month progress with two paintings per week.

I also did a Venetian masks painting and it fell short, sorry to say. Well you win some, you lose some.

Today was another Pastel Sunday. And the most fun part of it is that the kids tried to draw right by my side. I got the student grade pastels for them and my girlie (8 y.o.) drew a mushroom and my 11 y.o. did a landscape.

I drew wild pears that I photographed last year in a nearby open space, and the composition was very hard to capture, this piece took me a few hours and it’s so far the largest I made. But I am quite happy with it.

Watercolor:

Since I am doing the challenge this month, I did a small watercolor sketch every single day. My favorites this week are a Faberge egg and a hummingbird

Colored Pencils:

This week’s theme is rust, I only found one screw that looked rusty enough (see all drawings I am doing for this flashmob on instagram under #greenrainartfromlife)

Choir project: 

I am hard at work creating more posters for different countries, I finished reworking illustrations I used for the poster and Kenya so far is my favorite

MATS bootcamp: 

We had such an awesome assignment this week- to create a list of the challenges we overcame, to illuminate an initial and make some doodles for symbols of courage. All very inspiring. I was absolutely blown away by my fellow matsians stories and although my perfectly ordinary life didn’t seem to have any challenges at first, upon a closer look there were quite a few.

My initial is done with gouache and gel pens, my handmade paper sketchbook doesn’t seem to like gouache at all, so I will probably switch to some other paper and just paste scanned images into the notebook. See my progress on instagram under #greenrainartmats

100 days project is called -Make My Life Colorful

I am doing exercises from Color Theory book and also playing with prompts from a color group. So far I looked into various lighting options, explored some color terms (I am putting two or three per day on flashcards), refreshed by knowledge about value and played with some limited color palettes. See all on instagram under #100daysofgreenrainart

52 weeks illustration

I made one more for “Cinema” theme with markers (Anna Rastorgueva had a fabulous idea with camera and film in her webinar, and I loved playing with it and putting my favorite movies in).

For week 14 theme which is “Surprise” I drew a digital illustration of a surprise party. I think I somewhat managed to render the mood of an unawareness and anticipation.

Lettering challenge is all about poetry this month. Which means, I love it and had to do it. I had fun playing with pen and nibs, watercolor lettering and calligraphy markers. I try to diversify a little, but find my letters the prettiest when I don’t plan ahead. See all on istagram under #greenrainartlettering

Embroidery progresses nicely, I finished the tree and moved on to the second row of flowers. See all on instagram under #greenrainartembroidery 

Illustrated journal included paper collages, watercolor doodles and some pen sketches, all very quick. See al on instagram under #greenrainartij

 

I think that covers everything 😀 What a week!

Next week should be interesting with big assignment for MATS, finishing work for choir and other fun stuff.

Until then, hope everyone has a wonderful week!

Love,

Anya

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