Blog – Page 2 – Art by Kalinka

Help, where to start with pastels

Beginning with a new art medium can sometimes be overwhelming. So many brands, so many flavors.

In this section I’ll tell a thing or two about the products I use (or used to use)and what their advantages and disadvantages are (in my opinion at least).

Mind, I can only talk about my own experiences with these products, your experience can be totally different because your style may be different, or somehow materials that work for me, don’t work for you or vice versa.

Just know that I’m not affiliated to any brand at all and these are just my findings, for what they’re worth to you.

General

Pastels come in different shapes and colors. You can buy pencils, which are basically chalk in a wooden casing. You can also buy soft or hard pencils. Both are made of the same materials but hard pencils contain less pigment and more binder …

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That’s Weird

A few months ago, my good friend David Stefanelli asked me if I could make him a drawing of Weird Al Yankovic. He was invited to a show on August 5 by Kamal Asar, photographer for Weird Al’s tour in the US and he wanted to hand Alfred (Weird Al’s actual first name) a present for having him as a special guest.

I had surgery on my hand done, so it took a while before I could actually start making a serious attempt at it, but early july I finally finished my graphite drawing of Al. I added one of my business cards and wrote David’s address on the tube.

I rolled it up, put it in a tube and took it to the postal service for US Shipment. It was July 11, shipment should be in the US by July 20.

And then the stress began.

Somehow, the tube’s …

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Special moments

Just as for every other artist, being recognized as an artist to me is the ultimate compliment. Recognition comes in many forms. It can be found in comments on social media or in likes below a post. But the most rewarding forms of recognition are the real interactions you have with people that come in contact with your art and how they show that they remember these moments as much as you will.

Like the moment I had with Sully Erna, lead singer of Godsmack, when I gifted him a drawing I made of him and his daughter, back in 2017. He appeared to be fairly speechless and was genuinely happy with the gift. The tour manager told me that after he received this gift, he took out his phone and called his daughter to tell her about the drawing and during the solo show, singing “My Light” he teared …

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I have no business having business cards

Even though I have no business and even though I do not sell my drawings, every now and then someone asks for my business card.

So I had some made using some of the drawings I did.

Every time I create something and send it to someone, I will add this business card, asking them not to pay me, but to pay forward.

I hope everyone does, just like they promise before I send out an artwork.

Can you film what you do?

On various occasions people have asked me to film myself during the creative process. And on almost all of those occasions I totally forgot to get my phone and switch on the camera. But sometimes I remembered, even though it may have been halfway through a drawing. But I do have several different ways to approach my drawings. One of them is by using a grid. I place a picture behind a grid and then I draw a grid on my drawing paper. Cell by cell I sketch the major lines of the picture so I know what comes where. After that, I start the actual drawing process. Grid drawing is especially useful when you want to enlarge or slim down the size of the original picture. After all, what I see in a grid of 1×1 cm, I can draw into a grid of 2×2 cm, or 4×4. And …

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Pastel pencil winter scene

One of the online workshops I did, was drawing this cute wintery scene. Usually people ‘draw along’ with the workshop video, but since I’m a lefty and the workshop was done by a right handed person, I had trouble remembering all the things she did, working from left to right, while I wanted to work from right to left. So what I did was watch the video and then, listening to all the tips and tricks and then did it on my own. And I filmed every stage of drawing I did and merged all the shorter videos into 1 larger video, which I put in an extreme fast forward. Enjoy my drawing process:

On the cover

After visiting a solo show Sully Erna did in the Netherlands, I’ve stayed in touch with some of his bandmembers. David Stefanelli among them. At one point, David asked me if I was willing to draw an album cover for the debut album he was planning with Lisa Guyer. They promised to pay it forward so I got to work.

Coincidentally, my kids had a wonderful gift for my birthday back in 2017. A huge table top easel.

This enabled me to use a large drawing paper and to create a big drawing consisting of photo material David and Lisa send me. I wasn’t as advanced in drawing techniques as I am these days, so the large paper gave me the chance to really get in some of the details of the photo’s they send me, trying to recreate them in my drawing. All while their, not yet published, music …

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