Inktober Challenge: Completed!

Hello, and welcome to November. Congratulations on surviving the "boos" and pumpkins of October and good luck on making it though the Christmas decorations already overtaking the towns. They start appearing earlier each year, don't they?

Anyhow, a few posts ago I mentioned joining in the Inktober challenge fun. Originally, I was only aiming to complete 2 drawings a week, but then I ended up making all 31. They're all pretty small - on average less than 3x3 inches in size, and "casual" compared to the style of my finished work but I'm still pretty proud of myself for setting aside time for them. My theme was tokens and characters from my favourite films. Hope you enjoy!

Calendar view =) Films were picked each day based on mood.

 And here are a few close ups:

part 1

part 2

part 3

Oh, and if you're curious about which movies have been represented here's the list below.  (You can also flip through the images individually and read a tad more about the pictures via my Instagram page)

1. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. (I'm a fan of the 1st and 2nd movies, less pleased with the ones that followed)
2. Lord of the Rings - The Two Towers (I love all three parts of the trilogy, this was just the one the quotation is from)
3. The Mummy (Love The Mummy Returns also)
4. The Fifth Element
5. The Third & The Seventh (Only 12 minutes long, but fantastic)
6. You've Got Mail
7. The Fountain
8. Frozen
9. Pirates of the Caribbean (Fairly fond of all of them)
10. Inception
11. How to Train Your Dragon
12. How to Train Your Dragon 2
13. Tangled
14. The Wedding Singer
15. Ice Age
16. Disney's Robin Hood
17. Ghostbusters (1 and 2)
18. Titanic
19. Meet Joe Black
20. Sherlock Holmes
21. Guardians of the Galaxy
22. Wedding Crashers
23. Tristan and Isolde
24. James Bond - Skyfall
25. Hellboy
26. X-Men: First Class (I'm a fan of all the X-Men films, but I'll say that First Class and Days of Future Past are my favourite)
27. Batman Begins (Love all 3 films from the Dark Knight trilogy)
28. Back to the Future (The 1st and 3rd of the trio are great, but I'm not very fond of the 2nd one for some reason)
29. The Avengers
30. Lord of the Rings - The Fellowship of the Ring
31. Lord of the Rings - The Return of the King (There were still a few movies I could have given a nod to, but I decided to finish off the challenge by rounding out my Lord of the Rings collection because if I had to pick my MOST favourite film (or trilogy) that would be it.)

*Most of the pieces were completed with micron pens, ink wash, and/or white ink/gouache. 

Thanks for visiting! =)

All images are ©Mariya Olshevska

The Hair Day Dismay

Ok! Hi!

Today isn't going to be an art post, but more of a personal. comical story. Everyone has bad hair days, right? But some days are worse than others. I had an awful one, and the best way to cope with it was to write it out and draw some pictures. Hope you find it entertaining!

"The Hair Day Dismay"

After ogling over the many photo tutorials for numerous majestic braids, I decided to grow out my hair, so that I too could bask in the goddess-like glory of complex coifs. This attempt lasted roughly 7 months. When my pixie hair grew out enough to be twisted into a little French braid I saw that my fantasy wasn’t going to become a reality. My braid was sadly slim. What my whole head could produce amounted to 1/4-1/3 of the braid thickness to that of my inspiration photos. Oh, the joys of fine hair.

So, I decided to get it cut short again and bleach my roots while I was at it. When I made the decision I became very excited about it. There was only one problem – it turned out that my hair stylist was on leave and wouldn’t be back till possibly the end of autumn. I couldn’t wait that long. 

My mom suggested I go see her hair stylist, but I was reluctant because I’ve been to two of her stylists before and didn’t end up liking them for various reasons. Sorry mom!

I reached out on a couple of my social media sites for recommendations. Silence. Then, there was one response (thank you April!), but for the time being the suggested salon was a bit far for my liking. In turn, I decided to go for a stroll my local shopping centre and investigate my options. Most of the salons didn’t look busy and some had the service section deep behind the storefront, so it was hard to see who was cutting hair well. Rats!

Lastly, I checked out Zennkai*. It looked tidy. I knew they had many locations, suggesting they were doing well financially and that their customers were coming back. I also remembered seeing staff members with lovely hair when I bought shampoos there before. It seemed reasonable to try getting my hair done there.

On July 27^th, I walked in to book an appointment. I approached the receptionist and told her the kind of haircut and colour I was interested in. I wanted a platinum pixie cut, a style I’ve had and loved for many years. In turn, she confidently recommended a hair professional, let’s call her ‘A’, and assured me that she was excellent at cutting short styles. An appointment was scheduled for 3:30pm the next day.

I arrived with several pictures of the style I wanted and also explained my request with words. ‘A’ nodded, and began working at bleaching my roots. During the appointment, she hardly said anything, except to ask a couple of questions about my hair and to answer my queries of how the colour was turning out. As the chemicals were being rinsed off, I channeled happy thoughts.

When she began cutting my hair, I noticed that the colour looked strange – there were sections that looked orange, sections that looked yellow, and sections that looked grey. She said that some colour unevenness was to be expected, that it couldn’t be helped, and that it would be evened out once the cut was done. (Interestingly enough, this has never happened with my regular stylist.)

Then, as she was cutting my hair, it seemed like she was having a hard time, perhaps as if she wasn’t very practiced at cutting hair short. This scene was not matching up to the receptionist’s recommendation at all.

Finally, after what felt like a long time, (as it turned out it was after 6pm by then) she said she was done. She asked me what I thought, and studying my reflection I was so confused that I could hardly say anything except for “It sure is very different”. A walked off to ring up my fee, left her card, and disappeared.

Looking in the mirror, I touched my head and it felt damp, looked roughly chopped, unevenly coloured, and unhealthy. What I was seeing was very far from the pictures I had brought in. I hadn’t even seen the back yet, and couldn’t spot any hand mirrors which I could use to get a good look. 

By the time I walked up to the counter, I was torn between a desire to escape the now closed salon and to make a scene explaining how absurdly awful the hair was. A receptionist with shiny, purple hair greeted me and said that my new style suited me. Is that so? Maybe you ought to try it.

And then a remarkable thing happened. I slipped into a state where I was so angry and increasingly upset that I couldn’t deal with the potential incompetence of anything that might be said to me had I decided to complain. It was extremely out of character for me. Ever since I was little, I had no issues with confronting someone who treated me unfairly. I had no idea what happened. I just swiped and exited the salon as quickly as I could. By the time I got home I hated myself for not demanding compensation. That was by far worse than having terrible hair. I failed myself by not being myself. Never again. But the shopping centre was closed, I had lots of work to do, and I now had a bigger dilemma on my hands. The hair had to be fixed.

The following day, I combed through and examined it with hopes that I overreacted, or that it was just styled strangely. Unfortunately, that didn’t seem to be the case. In the light of day it looked worse than ever. I couldn’t bear the thought of going out in public with the crooked, blotchy disaster that was my head. I didn’t even own a hat.

After strategizing and researching for solutions online with my mom (thanks mom!), it was settled that my hair was healthy enough to hold up to another bleaching session that was needed to even out my colour. She graciously went out to get the bleaching product* we decided on and a nice hat.

Everything went smoothly. After this home bleaching, the hair was one and didn’t feel dry or damaged. Thank you hair gods! However, it still needed toning. That process went fairly well also, though the hair ended up with a baby blue hue to it. That was my own fault though, for leaving the toning solution on too long. At least it wasn’t the peachy/yellow/grey it was the day it was “done professionally”.

The cut wasn’t something that could be fixed at home, however. Time to call reinforcements –a.k.a. my mom’s stylist. She turned out to be a very nice, skilled lady, who on Friday that same week made it as if nothing horrible ever happened. My hair and I were happy. The end.

Felt good to get that off my chest!

Notes:

*Zennkai location – Coquitlam Shopping Centre

*Garnier Nutrisse Intense Bleach Cream D01

Pencil Portraits and Digital Doodles

Hello,

Since my last post, it seems Blogger has been having issues. For example, I can only see one post from my Reading List per day, and when I click "View More" nothing happens. Not sure if I'm the only one with this problem, but nonetheless, it's one of the reasons I haven't posted much lately. Been hoping that the glitches would be quickly fixed, but alas, they have not.
Also, I've been working away on some new, secret projects, so that's also why I haven't shared much.

Anyway, a short while ago, I've updated the tools at my disposal and have been experimenting with sketching and inking digitally. And it's been really fun! To no surprise - there are many benefits to drawing digitally. Here are my favourite:

1. You can erase, redraw, skew, and do all kinds of modifications to your sketch, pretty much infinitely. (Provided you don't delete your original image layer and all you have is some skewed experiment which you don't like the end result of.)

2. No more scanner dust cleanup. For people like me, who are pretty OCD about dust specks making into a nice sketch or inked drawing which I want to show later, this is fantastic. More time drawing, less time hunting for little dots.

3. You can only use one physical drawing tool - the pen stylus - to produce marks similar to pencils, markers, ink pens, paintbrushes, etc. It can take some research and experimenting before you get good at it, especially if you don't often work digitally, but any skill takes time to learn.

There's only one the only thing I dislike about drawing digitally so far:

1. Zooming in and out. Now, this isn't a true dislike. It's more of a personal "quirk" that digital tools let me exploit. I like to fiddle with my drawings, too much at times. So, whereas on paper - the size of my sketch is as big as I let it be on the sheet. And the tiny hand movements are restricted by the dexterity and size of my hand in proportion to the size of my drawing. BUT,  if I'm sketching in Photoshop on a tablet - I can zoom in, and in, AND IN, to make tiny little adjustments here and there. This isn't healthy at the sketch stage of an illustration, and something I have to restrain myself from. It's always better to make a new sketch.

Anyhow, that's that. Here are some sketches, both traditional and digital I've done for fun, during work breaks.

Also, as an exercise to get more comfortable with colouring digitally (so that I can quickly and easily do color studies and coloured concept thumbnails in the near future, and make finished digital illustrations in the slightly less near future) I decided to create a simple self-portrait, in a more comic/cartoon style.
Here is the breakdown of my process. (Pretty much the same as my traditional methods, but way more layers that I could click on and off)

Loose sketch

Digital line-work/ink

Added some simple colouring underneath the inking and that's what it looked like with the linework turned off.

Made some color adjustments to the some of the line-work to make it more in tone with the colous underneath.

Finished off the piece by adding some subtle patterns.

And made a GIF of these main steps, because it only takes me a minute to do that.

Have a nice week!

Sketches by the Shore

This past week I've been spending my time on a vacation of sorts in Puerto Vallarta/ Nuevo Vallarta, Mexico. Of course I had my sketchbook with me and in the afternoon I doodled on the beach.
Here are some pages:

The 'e' looks really odd but I'll just say it reflects the reclining position I was in as I drew.

For this doodle I even wrote a little poem:

"What this small kitten wanted most of all,

Was an escape to a a place where she knew no one at all.

Where she'd have luxury and simplicity at the same time,

One hand with a pina colada, and the other on a tree she could climb.

She wanted to sit still and gaze at the sky,

See stars glimmering and airplanes fly by.

She wanted to sit there all day and all night

Without receiving a single bug bite."

A super lazy attempt at drawing from life.

Inspired by storm that came in the afternoon

This is another lazy attempt at drawing something realistic, this time a photo from a magazine

I was feeling poetic again

Now I'll try to use 7-8 sentences to describe each day of my trip:

1 - Saturday - After arriving at the hotel I did, in fact, get caught in the rain and have a couple of pina coladas.

2 - Sunday - It was the first time I had ever fallen asleep on the beach.

3 - Monday - The highlight of the night was getting dressed up and going to the Italian restaurant at the resort

4 - Tuesday - It turned out that swimming in the ocean was not really an option due to murkiness and sting rays popping up, so from this day I resorted to swimming in the pool each day for as long as possible - that is until too many people got in.

5 - Wednesday - It really baffled me why in an almost empty pool, people would prefer swim into the small section of the pool I was using, only to stop and tread water in place (at the most). "Move! I'm actually getting exercise here!"

6 - Thursday - Took a bus trip to the downtown of Puerto Vallarta to get some souvenirs and later that night I saw sea turtles hatching and going into the the ocean.

7 - Friday - Got my overgrown hair braided.

8 - Saturday - I've never seen so many Duty-Free stores in an airport that REQUIRE you to go through them in order to get to your gate. Kahlua and Baileys it is!

Cedric the Snooze

"Cedric the Snooze"

Cedric the Snooze

drank too much booze,

so on pillows he drifted,

till his spirits were lifted.

That was another sketchbook doodle I've completed recently, accompanied by an impromptu poem.

Happy Sunday!

Sketchbook Doodles

Thought I'd post some pages from my mini sketchbook tonight.
These are just some casual, spontaneous pen drawings=)

Some odd snake things. I don't even know...

Cat-Tea