What a month! April 24

Hello everybody, and a special welcome to our one new subscriber!

So, another month has passed. Was it interesting? Dive in, guys! 😊

April wasn't as productive as March, but it actually started pretty well, at least in terms of new stuff.

An Easel and the Divergence of My Artistic Path

As you can tell from the title, I finally bought my own easel! I haven't had one since art school, and I really missed it. Now I have it, yay! This aligns with my thoughts about splitting my artistic vision into two different streams—one focused on my digital pinup art and the other on watercolor paintings of cities, nature and people. I love watercolor painting so much, and I see it as a way to reach a new audience and to break into art galleries in the future. You know, traditional art as a gateway to eventually show people my pinup work. An elaborate plan, right? 😆

Cancellation of My Planned Trip to Spain This Summer

This is the saddest part of the month. I planned a month-long trip to Spain to live in Barcelona, visit all of its museums, and create a lot of fresh art. Unfortunately, my visa application was declined without any chance to fix it. This was a real bummer, and it took me a week to gather my thoughts and emotions to think straight again. As if that wasn't enough, I came down with a horrible flu that consumed another two weeks.

Artworks of the Month

Depression, emotional instability, and illness—doesn't sound like a recipe for effective work, right? Despite it all, I still managed to create two pinup artworks for the public, and I even got a new unpaid commission, guys. So unexpected, but here's another picture. Enjoy! 😊

Artists' Talk with Women Artists

I visited a new art space in Yerevan for an artist talk. Eight female artists shared their journeys to becoming artists. One story particularly amazed me—it was about a woman originally from France who moved to Armenia to conduct art therapy sessions for former soldiers. It turns out we both worked on the Easter Egg project (see the previous WHAM post from March '24).

Portrait Course by Victor Melamed

I've decided to improve my portrait skills and enrolled in a new portrait course by the talented Victor Melamed. I don't even remember how long I've been following him, so this is a great opportunity to gain new insights for my portrait skills. For my student project, I had to choose two celebrities and create portraits of them in different ways. I chose Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida as my personas.

One of the tasks was to approach my characters through shapes like triangles, circles, lines, and even animals—honestly, I have no idea what will come of this. It's an experiment!

Another assignment for this course was to capture vivid facial expressions in our characters.

And a portrait of Sophia Loren in my usual style. 😊

Plein Air Near the Mountain

And here's a pleasant story to wrap things up! The artist who helped me with the Easter Egg project invited me to do some outdoor drawing (or as artists call it, en plein air 🤓). We drove to the mountain, set up our things on the ground, and went searching for a good spot to draw. Here's what I created that day. As I mentioned in the "easel section," this is my other passion—watercolor nature. I want to create a series of drawings of Armenia using this technique. What do you think? I know this isn't the art you originally came here for, but WHAM is a good place to share all my projects. 😊

See you next month, guys!