All About Organizing

A couple of months ago I received quite a challenging order. My task was to design leading elements for the website of a client who unclutters and organizes office spaces. The website is called All About Organizing.

The ultimate goal was to create a sort of triptych, illustrating the three stages of the uncluttering process: the assessment, the organizing, and the final result. But first, I had to make a cartooned character of the lady who owns the business, in three different poses, with different expressions, suitable for each stage.

The next step was creating the background for the triptych, representing a fictional office in three conditions: messy, being uncluttered, and glisteningly organized. I started with a perfectly organized room and then messed it up as much as I could -- it was the easiest way.

Now all I had to do was to bring the organizing lady into the action. Below you can see the final result, ready to be incorporated in the website header.

My Old Nimbus 2000

Harry Potter. I had seen some movies, and played some games, but never read any of the books. This summer I've finally decided to sit down to it, so here I am, reading the UK edition from my wife's collection.


I'm enjoying the books immensely, despite the little mistakes scattered here and there. I really liked the movies (so far I've seen the first three of them), but the books are, well, books. A whole different level of submergence into the magic world of Hogwarts, with myriads of tiny, but important details, regrettably (but unavoidably) missed in the movies.

Anyway, today, when lurking around outside the house, I've found my own Nimbus Two Thousand! Well, actually, it's just an old broom from the backyard, but it will do perfectly for a Muggle like me...

Meeting Razmadze

A couple of weeks ago Ramaz Razmadze, a fellow Georgian surrealist, arrived in Lithuania with a small gang of other Georgian painters to participate in a plein-air event together with a group of local artists. They were based in Molėtai, a small town some 60 kms north of Vilnius.

When the event was finished, they moved to Vilnius for a few days of touring before departure. Although Ramaz and I had known each other for years online, we had never met in person, so we couldn't miss this wonderful chance to finally meet each other, thousands of miles away from homeland. Yesterday, it happened at last -- we shook hands at the Cathedral Square, where Ramaz introduced me and Diana to the other three Georgian artists who arrived with him.

After visiting the Cathedral, where we took the opportunity to see the famous St Casimir's chapel, we roamed about the Old Town for a while, before landing at an open-air snack-bar to have a beer.

The rightmost fellow on the photo, easily distinguishable from the resort-tanned companions who had spent a healthy fortnight of working in the open air, is me. Ramaz is sitting right next to me. I hadn't spoken in person to a living Georgian for about 18 months, and here I had the fourfold pleasure of conversing with the fellow countrymen -- and fellow artists, on top of that. Besides, I had wanted to meet Razmadze, whose art I greatly admire, for years. So I had a really great time. Until next!

Lemonade for the Masses

The summer is hot, even here, in Lithuania. Now imagine how hot it must be in Georgia, which is some 2500 kms to the south. Luckily, I have a strong base of lemonade-making customers there, who are more than eager to provide you with cheap, but nonetheless tasty refreshing drinks. What more can you dream of in the heat of the summer? Ice-cream, maybe... but we're getting distracted.

So here it is -- a series of aerated refreshing drinks from one of my regular clients based in Western Georgia. Actually, it's a brewery, but it produces large amounts of non-alcoholic drinks as well, like many other Georgian breweries do. The series is called Tskhratskaro and it comes sugar-free. Please, don't try to pronounce the name, unless you're a native Georgian speaker, otherwise you may receive a permanent damage to your utterance apparatus. Literally, it means "nine springs" and it's a toponym -- two mountains, a mountain pass and a village is called by that name, although the product itself has no connection to any of those geographic places.


There's nothing much to say about technicalities. Fast order, limited budget for stock images, basic printing technology. Designed for 1 and 1,5 liter PET bottles. Done in CorelDRAW X5, photos edited in Corel PHOTO-PAINT.

Dad

This is my father. We have never lived together, he has another family and so on, but we're on good terms. I took his photo in December 2009, a couple of months before my departure from Tbilisi. Usually he wears only a moustache, no beard, but he had quite a stubble on that occasion. I really liked his grizzled beard and told him that I was gonna take his picture and draw his portrait from it when I had time, so he gladly posed.

I haven't seen him for 16 months and I really miss him. Last month I decided to finally sit down to the portrait. It dragged on, as usual, but now it's finally finished.


I believe it's my fourth attempt in oil pastels, and it seems I'm slowly getting my hand in this medium. I usually try to develop the colors and shades evenly and gradually, as I was taught back in the art school, but this time I chose to proceed in a different manner, finishing separate parts almost completely. As you see from the WIP shots below, first I rendered the central part, then the top area, and lastly the bottom part.

The drawing was done on a grey pastel paper with a smooth finish. Colors blended easily and I didn't have to use any chisels or such for blending, just an occasional finger-work. Here's a zoomed detail to show the technique up close and personal.

Spring in Your Eyes

It seems that spring has finally come to Lithuania. It's in the air, and it's irresistible. Yesterday, on the last day of April, as I was planting some potatoes in our kitchen garden, I felt a sudden urge to draw something for the season, quick and simple. So here's my humble tribute to the beauty of spring.

It's done with H, HB and 5B pencils and a mechanical pencil. The model was Diana, of course. Below you can see the work in progress and a zoomed detail.

Pegė Logo

Last month I won a logo contest at uzdarbis.lt, a Lithuanian design-related forum. The logo was for an online store for baby products, such as prams, soothers, etc. This is the final version the client chose:
Next, they asked me to help with the facade design for their physical store, fitting in style with the new logo. The process turned out to be quite long, mainly because of the window design, which went through numerous trials and tribulations, until it was finally approved sometime in the middle of April.


But that's not all. The final task was creating the website header. They wanted something cheerful, in the mood of the logo. I liked the idea of their draft header, which included sun, fluffy clouds and a rainbow, so I decided to offer my version of it. Here's the result:

I know, I wasn't much of a blogger this month, but I have quite a few ongoing projects, so, hopefully, I'll be more active next month. See ya!