war and peace

ahoy there

lots of stuff is going on right now

not sure how to put it all in words. not sure if i should at all bother…

well lets start and then see how it goes

the war, people. the war is real.  the air raid sirens are real. the mortar rockets are real.

my ever strengthening faith is real too. the faith in evil.

the ninth month of my pregnancy is real.  the kicks and pushes to my insides are real.

isn’t that weird…

 

part of my man’s colleagues are recruited so he works double shifts now.  which is hard.

even though, we slowly prep and organise our flat, and do a ton of crafting, fixing, organising progects. which is awesome.

as for the couple-quality-time – it’s long gone.  that’s why i so smartly use the air-raid-sirens-hiding-in-the-bathroom-time as an extra hugging-time.

(officially we should be going to the staircase or a basement every time but we don’t)

 

other things i’m up to:

cooking efforts still going strong. kinda.

redoing and upcycling some of our furniture, all found on the streets or been given by friends and coworkers still going strong.

drawing…. going pretty weak…   🙂

here’s another sketch for my dad’s poem about an old sailor, where he tells picturesque stories about his adventures to kids

 

 

 

 

p.s.   people had been really amasing and just won’t stop giving me all sorts of baby stuff. loads of it. i love it.  i love that it’s all second hand. love that it’s eco-friendly cause i don’t buy anything. love that it’s free. love that people i barely know care enough to do that. and i have so much of everything now i might start regretting i don’t have twins or something.  i was thinking when the time comes and i don’t need these things anymore i’d pass it to new emigrant single mothers or something.  russians are always so confused and smitten when someone is nice to them just because.  sad really.

p.p.s. latest film recommendation – ‘boyhood’.  haven’t seen it myself yet but looks like something extraordinary!

 

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festive flapjacks, beer bread and a sea dog (or a sea wolf) and a theatre backstage. a mishmash really.

my dad’s poem about a sea dog (wolf)

 

so my dad’s a poet. a children’s poet. writing in russian and living there.
he asked me to try to illustrate a couple of his older poems, both sea themed.

although my drawing skills r a bit rusty by now i started straight away. well, not straight away cause i did this before.

note: in russian a sea dog (an old experienced sailor) is called a sea wolf, so this whole poem is based on a play between the words wolf (animal) vs. a sea wolf (person)

and the poem goes like this:

i’ve heard lots of stories

but this one is weirder than most

a peculiar wolf lives in a seacoast village

never saw a rabbit

but often times whales and sharks

he swims crawl and breaststroke

otherwise he’d drown

and it’s not spooky to meet him on the street at night

since its known

that the wolf is completely tamed

he hangs out with a couple of monkeys

and his cap is askew

a bunch of boys running after him all day

is his tail

(be warned: translation mine, rough, lousy and not precise, but the main metaphors are all there)

that’s the half of the poem that u see on the sketches and there’s another half i don’t have sketches for yet

the cookies are my take on nigel slater‘s  festive chocolate flapjacks

i think i like the guy and his easy recipies being a girl who grew up in a family where the mother didn’t cook (AT ALL) and the father cooked just really basic stuff (since he had to). i like how he talks about cooking as an expression of sympathy and appreciation. of love really. i think it puts me in a right mindset and keeps me motivated. most of the time.

and this is what i baked last weekend, a beer bread: bottle of beer flour salt some sugar, that’s it. so easy to make i almost didn’t believe the outcome would be good. but it was.

beer bread. if i can do it and it’s edible – anyone can!

 

 

and lastly a photo of me at work for your viewing pleasure.

love location photos. or should i call it environment or setting photos, i don’t know.

yours truly backstage

 

i work in props and costumes department of a local national theatre, remember?

 

until next time,

be well and exercise,

me

 

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windows and balconies

“the possibility”

here’s a new sketch…

… and here’s a final drawing:

“the possibility”

 

and here’s a young lady spending some time by the window so as not to miss her daddy coming home from work:

“is it him?! is it him?!”

 

until next time

and take care

 

 

p.s. i thought i’d add something about the drawing.

i have like half a dozen dream scenarios i keep dreaming from time to time most of my life. most of them nightmares (but not all). like the one where i go visit the town i grew up in and miss the flight back home.  this one is the worst…
the drawing above is a contemplation on one of those dreams. and although it might not seem like it, this dream is one of the good ones…

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no title

http://www.aidaplace.wordpress.com

i drew this the other day

it has no title

it has one working title but it’s in russian and i failed to translate it to hebrew or english.

what do people exclaim before starting a journey? not ‘go ahead’, not ‘forward!’, right? i delved a little in google translator and came up with nothing.

rather surprisingly the drawing seems to have stricken the fancy of my facebook-illustration-group pals (the group is not mine, there are couple of hundreds of other illustrators and wannabes there)

i’m curious what they see in it/how they interpret it.

this time i tried a different approach and new technique.
because my will power is rather absent and because i tend to act all perfectionist in the wrong places, i get cold legs and don’t finish stuff.
but i have to work with what i have right? so i thought about a theme and a mixed technique that would be quick undemanding yet suited to my artistic needs.
it’s an acrylic background with graphite pencil, color pencils and wax caran d’ache water-soluble pastels on top. all in all rather easy and unthreatening, so while working on it i didn’t loose the right mood and the motivation, which is nice.

p.s.  middle eastern wabi sabi….what day is it today? right, sunday:

http://www.aidaplace.wordpress.com

p.p.s. i went out shopping the other day in downtown. i needed a few small things from different local shops. it was tough but i toughed it out.

i said: ‘no, i don’t need a plastic bag, thank you’ maybe 7 times ( and indeed i didn’t need one, i had my backpack with me) the most common reaction to this being the ‘i don’t get it’ look followed by a plastic bag being pushed into my hands.
we are falling a little behind in all this environmental awareness thing. or rather, way way way behind, on so many levels…

well…just a thought.

take care

(and don’t take a plastic bag if you don’t need one.

and you don’t)

UPDATE:   i’ve got the title, it’s  –    ‘off i go’

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finally a finished sketch

well,… i think this was the most tedious sketch i’ve ever done. it involved loads of heavy googling for retro lab equipment and victorian interiors and such like (english garden, 1950s girls dress, victorian rug, microscope…..), cause you know i’ve never had any reason to know how these things really look like before.
hours of staring on late 19th early 20th century photos made me realize maybe it’s time to consider getting glasses more seriously. well, what can i say, the toughest part is definitely not yet behind me.

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new character and new sketch

i started to work a little on this children book illustration i mentioned before.

i’m starting off with a sort of trial painting to help me make some decisions about the style, color scheme and so on.

this is a rough sketch of it and some musings about the main character.

i’m pretty happy about the both of them

in the meantime i’m very tempted (and often give in) to work on some sewing projects instead of drawing

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sketch

this is how it looks for now.  funny enough when i finished it it reminded me of  “the creation of adam” by michelangelo (yes, i had to google how it’s called). because of the hands. i don’t really know why my subconscious did that.  when i asked it about it it looked the other way and pretended to be deaf (too many “it” i know)

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other stuff i do

my BF had his ….nth birthday last week 🙂

and i had to come up with a cute present on a budget cause i had not much money for one thing , on the other hand he’s got everything he needs and what he haven’t got yet i can’t possibly get him anyways (cars and motorcycles and stuff like that)

so….     i took a photo of him asking him to make the angriest face he can manage while he thought it was for one of my latest portfolio photoshop projects

and then played with it in photoshop and made this stencil, printed it cut it out, bought second hand cheap t-shirt, fabric paint and voila!

the back of the shirt reads “of a patient man” obviously, and i think it suits him, both the shirt and the expression

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winds of change

i’m considering leaving the color pencil forever behind me in favor of WAX PASTEL

you see, i took this illustration workshop few days back and was lucky to get some useful comments on my drawings

mainly i was told they lack of contrast

which is because of the technic i’m  using, color pencil, like, the white can’t look really white if you’r drawing on dark green paper

so…i’v tried the wax pastels yesterday and really liked them, you can get bight colors pretty much effortlessly with them

too bad they are so pricey out here

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new sketches

so…a few years back i wrote several short stories and been wanting to illustrate them since then. the stories are about strange ways of friendship basically. the characters are two truck drivers.  i’m very excited to finally get to do this.  so here are some sketches of the future drawing -upper right corner first one, lower left- last one. i even got myself sneaked (i hope that’s understandable English) to an actual truck company to do some reference shooting.
on a random note: new funny word i’ve learned yesterday – FACETIOUS!   isn’t it cute?!  🙂

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