While on my way to my greatgrandmother’s house in Beshtau (Stavropol region), in Moscow I met AntiMona. Allow me to introduce you.
AntiMona is my very first attempt at da Vinci fan art, and she is also part of a new project I’m working on. I’m still thinking of a proper name for the project, but essentially it’s a paper sketchbook take on Instagram.
When I was getting ready for my trip, I, of course, could not resist the temptation of getting a new sketchbook. And since it was a really special one I liked a lot, it deserved its own project.
The rules are quite simple, there are just three of them:
- The picture has to be square.
- The picture has to be based on real life experiences (either a live drawing or a picture I take on the trip).
- The picture uses a combination of watercolor and my usual black pen lines and dots.
I wanted to start drawing on the train, but it was way to shaky for my crazy obsessive inner perfectionist, so I ended up spending my time just laying out the squares on the pages. That saves time and makes things easier later. And it’s also a quiet and meditative thing to do that does not require any intellectual focus. Which is nice when you’re tired.
Now I have 80 squares waiting to be filled with pics. On the back page I jot down ideas for what the pictures will be, so I don’t have to painfully try to remember this wonderful idea I had when I sit down to draw.
I am loving the series so far. I’ve done the AntiMona, a fragment of Serpukhovskaya metro station, our Beshtau kitchen stove with pans and ladles and a bouquet of chili peppers, and a magical yellow and grey tree I met at the top of the hill where I’m living now, and today I am working on some cut off chicken heads.
And this is the prototype of my AntiMona. I’m still deeply in love.