Milan

Duomo di Milano

 In the piazza in front of Duomo. what is it?

 One needs a lot of strenuous training to explore Italy.

 View from the roof of Duomo.

 On the roof of Duomo.

 Dinner. It was delicious.

We can always find some Roman ruins in Italy.

 I hope you recognize these people.

 Science and technology museum.

 Three random people and italian police horses. Note those stylish blue hats. 

 castello sforzesco

 Nina's shirt + graffiti

weekend

              N's weekend plan 

H's ice cream recipe 

2 more chairs

2 more chairs, originally uploaded by agpolaris.

In some sort of parallel universe I play with birds and cats and sometimes knit peacefully.

apples and oranges

apples and oranges, originally uploaded by agpolaris.

I was trying to be clever here - apples and oranges and ... wait for it - dog and cat, wait, wait - white and black! I had this idea for a while now - to do a series based on food phrases - "meat and potatoes", "wake up and smell the coffee", "forbidden fruit", "go bananas", etc. maybe i will also brunch out into animal phrases :) "hot dog", anyone?

riding a white bunny in the winter

riding a white bunny in the winter, originally uploaded by agpolaris.

Another painting on brown paper. First I painted it with a watered down acrylic paint - it became very wavy, had to iron it after it was dry. For the drawing/painting i used acrylic paints - face, hair, dress, butterflies; white marker, black prismacolor marker. I love using white marker on dark paper, there is something magical in how the shape emerges from the background, the reverse of it - putting dark background around the light shape does not feel the same. i wonder why.

Playing around

blue, brown, and orange, originally uploaded by agpolaris.

Experimenting some more - with brown paper. It is a construction paper from home depot, I think it is usually used as floor covering when walls are being painted. It absorbs paint very quickly, everything is dry in seconds.
As for the subject - I always liked nests and eggs - especially eggs I have many sketches with eggs and chickens in it, should do something with them soon.

scrapbooking exercise

The inspiration came from here (it is in russian but the pictures are pretty self-explanatory). In this post illustrator and designer  Natalie Ratkovski talks about exercising your skills and imagination by taking a random image - ink stains, shadows, fragments of photographs and completing them in some new, unexpected way which has nothing in common with the original image. It seemed like an interesting way of doing things, very different from how I approach things.  Usually the idea comes first and then the image reflects it. In this exercise the image is primary, the idea and final image is based on it. Here is what I got:

In the last image I did not take a picture of "before", it has 2 photo fragments - large black part in the quilt and part of the pillow above the boy's head.
This is pretty interesting exercise and I learned something about myself. I have a problem with relinquishing control :) I look at these drawings and see - I did everything to hide every last shred of those original images. Next I have to try ink stains.