Category: Blog

Karolina Szablewska’s art blog. New art, musings on creating art, and thoughts on life are posted here. Currently, you’re mostly likely to see en plein air sketching, urban sketching, and posts on the science-fiction art series of oil paintings, More Human Than Human.

OIAF 2019 Screening & The Body Electric Exhibit

OIAF 2019 Animation Screening I have some exciting news! Ever since the start of the U m a m i Animation YouTube channel, I’d be getting more involved in doing something I said I’d “never do” – animating. I worked on some portions of the script & some of the human faces in this animation which will be screening as part of the OIAF 2019 – Ottawa International Animation Festival. This is actually happening the same time as the exhibition below! So if you’re around …

One Week 100 People 2019

One Week 100 People is an art challenge where, over the span of a 5 day work week (or 7 as a normal week), sketchers draw 100 people – roughly 20 per day. I first learned about this challenge from a local sketcher friend, please have a look at his work and blog! 🙂 I have also participated in 2017 and all of the drawings are available in this blog post. Last year, I chose not to do the art challenge because the dates were …

Inktober – Favourites & Further Thoughts

The past couple years, I’ve done the Inktober art challenge. The first time I tried it was in 2016. Legitimately, my art practice was kind of non-existant in the fall and so it was a good motivator. It’s fun to think about how much life changes from one autumn to the next. I never got around to making a blog post dedicated to what I did, so I’m going to make on this year as I decided not to do the challenge. Usually, when artists …

Colour Tests for “Torso” Painting

Time for your opinion. I’ve been trying the Flemish painting technique recently, which involves using a greyscale layer to build values, then glazing colour over top. I’m working on this painting with oils.   Over the last month, I’ve collectively already spent about 14 hours on this image. I wanted to get things just right before moving onto colour. I had most of the idea and composition ready before I started, but now I’m at a crossroads and wondering what you think of the following: …

It Takes Time to Compose an Image

  This painting was a challenge from the very sketches I started with. Since it’s been a whole year since the last oil painting of this series, this is the second painting so far in a series that is loosely working itself out to be about technology, medicine, and disability. Unlike the last where I had an exact pose instantly, I knew what I wanted to paint but no idea of how it would look. Imagine a cloud of colours — that was all I …

My Last Several Pieces Made on Twitch

When I started streaming, it was an experiment to see if anyone at all would show up. Just even 1 person I don’t already know as a friend, or family, or someone else. I didn’t expect anything from it. Everyone’s asking me how I can tolerate having a camera pointed in my face when I can barely tolerate giving a presentation to a room of 3? Good question, because the truth is: I don’t know. I’m not psychologist and I can’t explain it, however I …