New York

I just spent the last weekend in New York city, learning really cool technique from the master painter Timothy Clark, an amazing and very generous artist.
We worked from a life model all day Saturday and Sunday, was quite challenging because of the space, other than that it was a lot of fun and a lot of learning, very inspiring.

I used a limited palette, yellow ochre, Ultramarine blue, Cad red, and Burnt sienna and some cad orange.

concentrated on the shadows and shapes.This is a sample of my work.

I AM BACK
It has been a while since I posted on my blog, my apologies for all my followers, it has been a tough year, and when life gets in the way the first thing to go usually is my art.

I updated my blog title, "evolving expressions" so it is not only about painting and drawing but other types of expressions mostly thoughts and ideas, we all know painting is a form of  expression , however there are those days where I have ideas I would like to share with you,  about art or just life in general.

This is a sketch that was done on hot press, I started with a rough drawing with ink, then glazed over it with watercolour.

A TRIBUTE

Nabila Hilmi

Wednesday was a sad day when I heard of the passing of Nabila Hilmi, a dear friend, family and world renowned artist.

Was not expected and was sudden, I was speechless but very emotional, she meant a lot to me and was a very inspiring person, she motivated me to expand my work and take it further than just few art workshop here and there.

I met her when I was eight years old as a friend of the family but she definitely left her impression as a good listener, she became a relative by marriage several years down the road, we became very close.

she recognized the artist in me and that's why the first thing she would ask me after a long time of not seeing each other would be : "how is your art?"

I can't find enough words to describe her, however the link at the top of the post takes you to her website.

Nabila, you will be sorely missed. Abeer

Portrait classes

I went to a portrait class last Wednesday by Brian Smith, it was worth every minute of my time, we learned first how to do head gestures then a model posed for the rest of the afternoon for us to draw her, this is the result.

Charlevoix

I spent last five days at Charlevoix, Quebec, and here are my skteches.

More pastel pencils

We went to our chalet in blue Mountain for the Holidays, spend Christmas there, skied a little, ate a lot and had fun with my family, since I didn't pack with me much art tools I kept it simple, just sketching here and there, but the sketches I made were not worth posting. This one is.

I took this picture of this woman from a TV interview about elephant poachers, I am not sure if I am in violation of copy rights here or if this is allowed, but rest assured I will not be submitting it to any competition, I just did it for fun, I thought she has such compelling features that I decided to draw her , I discovered that drawing is my strongest skill at the moment, I thought of using watercolor, but since everybody knows how frustrating it is to get the features correct and how challenging it is, I decided to use pastel pencils, the vibrancy of the colours is what attracts me to this medium.

the paper I used is Casson, mi-teinte the rough side of it and the size is 12x18.

pastel

I tried pastel pencils for the same portrait that was done in watercolour, I liked that I could mix colour on the paper without getting mud, on the contrary, I am getting luminous colours, I am having so much fun with these pencils, I am carrying them around with my purse.