Road trip summer is coming to an end, we’ve been circling the nature sites in South and East Estonia and my theory is that what put us on the move is this unusually cold summer, until the end of july we didn’t see a day over +16C.
It sounds bad but it also means that the nature is behind one month, which also means that everything is fully blossoming, colorful and green a month later than usual. Not a great summer for leisure but a great one for looking around and browsing the picture perfect sites in nature. I’ve never seen such perfect greenery this late in the summer or the forest full of blueberries , bright yellow Gantharellus cibarius mushrooms and strawberries and the flower fields so full of blossoms.
These small road trips have had a huge influence on my painting work this summer, I noticed there have been a ton of bears and green trees on my painting desk.
Even when we were sitting at the beach in East, lake Peipus, ended up sketching bears. I added two pictures I will add the others later. As most of the time, paintings are available at www.5erg.etsy.com
The Independence Day weekend has been a good time with some inks and canvases, I’ve been cutting up big pieces of it and spent a whole lot of hours listening to stand up clips on Spotify and working on creepy abstract birdmonsters and other monsters.
Happy Halloween and somehow Inktober 2016 has ended so quickly!
I hope everyone who enjoys drawing knows about this challenge already, if you don’t then put it into your calendar for the next year to draw one ink drawing a day for the entire month of October. Each day has a preset theme, you need to google it then. It’s fun, I promise :3
Peipsi tint (Osmerus eperlanus morfa spirinchus) is a fish that lives very happily in the great lake of Peipsi, in the East part of Estonia. My word, I get it, Peipsi has the best beaches, especially in the northern side. Best meaning here that it’s very slowly getting deeper, there are hardly any people there and it’s so clean. Not sure if someone cleans it or it just stays like this, but never seen even a cigarette butt out there. Maybe the Peipsi tint eats it.
Oh and now I’ve missed out on a perfectly good pun too, because Peipsi is the lake, “tint” also means “ink” in Estonian and I was out there at the Peipsi shore painting with inks.
Moment of silence for the pun.
But here we go, off to the next topic and that is house cafes. We had a coffee and a cake at the cutest one in Kallaste. If you happen to go see the sandstone cliff (you know that awkward moment when there’s that time when you have to call a 4 meter sandstone exposure a cliff to get a feeling you went and saw something) at Kallaste town, you can find the Anna cafe and hostel near the crossroad and it’s like a Russian theme house that is an experience (notice: Estonia is not Russia. Russia is different. But there are a lot of Estonian Russians living near the Peipsi lakes Estonian side and it’s a part of the areas culture and it’s interesting).
Painting with ink at KauksiAnna cafe and hostel at Kallaste
These guys in Finland, pa-trolling the hate mongers this winter, brilliant.
Loldiers of Odin in Tampere, Finland
Love them and wanted to paint a big picture to hang on my wall to remind us that there are still good people in the world. And I wish them a lot of strength in their fight against blind fear. They’re on Facbook: https://www.facebook.com/loldiers/ You know we need them, let them know too.
You can be in awe of bikes, if you check some facts later is all comes together. There are 800 000 bikes in the city which should be 4x more than cars and about 60% of the people use a bike every day.
This little guy getting stung by a bee at the Rijksmuseum:
Attended crafters and creative businesses summit to discuss some problems in Europe and options to make things better. 44 people + 20 people from about 20 countries. Cool stuff!
I guess the main reason ravens are on these paintings is that they’re gorgeous.The other reason is that they’re awesome birds. Smart (Quote: “Their beak cannot open tough skins of the carcasses, that’s why when they encounter a big corpse, they make calls that attract wolves and foxes to the site and the large carnivores can break the carcass”, playful( Video: rolling around in the snow) and they do random stuff ( Quote “anting feels great if you’re a bird”)
When it comes to intelligence, these birds rate up there with chimpanzees and dolphins. In one logic test, the raven had to get a hanging piece of food by pulling up a bit of the string, anchoring it with its claw, and repeating until the food was in reach. Many ravens got the food on the first try, some within 30 seconds. In the wild, ravens have pushed rocks on people to keep them from climbing to their nests, stolen fish by pulling a fishermen’s line out of ice holes, and played dead beside a beaver carcass to scare other ravens away from a delicious feast.
If a raven knows another raven is watching it hide its food, it will pretend to put the food in one place while really hiding it in another. Since the other ravens are smart too, this only works sometimes.”
You can read rest of the 10 raven facts in this blog: http://mentalfloss.com/article/53295/10-fascinating-facts-about-ravens
I’ve tried a lot of different stuff with ravens and I feel like they’re a great subject. All done with brushes and inks, on 20x30cm loose canvas. Some of these are for sale in my shop on Etsy (shipping is worldwide and I’m located in Estonia, North-Europe): www.5erg.etsy.com
Ink teal ravel in rainstormAbstract ink raven paintingFOR SALE: Abstract raven painting on canvas. Click on the photo to go to the Etsy listing.FOR SALE: Abstract raven painting – flying at you. Click on the image to see the listing on Etsy.FOR SALE: Abstract raven painting – glitch art. Click on the image to see the listing on Etsy.FOR SALE: Abstract raven painting – abstract bird art. Click on the image to see the listing on Etsy.Abstract flying raven. Click on the photo to go to the Etsy shop.
