Flying Bird Drawings

Flying birds seem to be a trend with my clients. After I had first created a drawing of flying mallards for Buffalo Jackson Trading Co. a few years ago, I was approached by a number of people wishing to have a flying bird drawn for different purposes including logo design and branding, web site graphics, t-shirt design, custom stationery design etc. No wonder, flying birds are popular as they look really beautiful and graceful and let humans at least feel the freedom they will never have. In this blog post I would like to show you some of my flying bird drawings.

Flying Osprey

Watch this video on Youtube

This flying osprey was drawn for Alexa Pulitzer LLC - personal stationery manufacturer

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How Google’s Webspam Team Works (Featuring Matt Cutts)

It’s unlikely that anybody who visits my blogs knows who Matt Cutts is. I myself was unaware of the man till recently. But in fact Matt is a very useful man who works as the head of Google's Webspam team which goal is to protect all us, users of the World Wide Web, from an annoying and sometimes even dangerous spam. But let me tell you why I am writing about him here.

Challenging the Power of the Internet

So I have a good fried who works as a translator, copywriter and SEO (search engine optimizer) and who helps me a lot with promoting my business online. He never stops talking about the outstanding power of the Internet in the matter of getting any message to the world and reaching out to influencers of any industry. According to my friend the only thing needed to attract attention even of the biggest guys is the content that would appeal to them. And so I asked him who were the influencers of the industry HE worked in and whether I could reach out to them with MY content and with the help of the almighty Internet. I learned then a few names from my friend including Matt Cutts who seemed to be Zeus for SEO’s.

Matt Cutts fighting spam with his "team"

So the challenge for me as an artist was to create an image that would be shared in the World Wide Web and eventually be seen by Matt Cutts. And hopefully this image would be appealing enough for Matt so that he would be willing to leave his comment below the post. I have come up with this cartoon showing Matt Cutts fighting spam with a penguin and a panda (as I learnt from my friend, Penguin and Panda were the codenames of the latest Google’s search engine updates aimed at reducing spam and offering a better search experience for all Google users). The idea was to depict Matt driving a vehicle which would remind the word “Google”.

Well, let’s hope it won’t take too long for Matt Cutts to see this cartoon and comment here. I also hope I’ll be able to tell apart real Matt Cutts from false ones that may want to comment as well.

Update: Matt replied me in Twitter within 10 minutes (!) after this post was published. I am now totally convinced of the outstanding power of the Internet!

Matt Cutts replied me in a moment after this blog post was published

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Portrait of a Ukrainian Girl

This is not for the first time that I create portraits of Ukrainian women. Being a Ukrainian artist, I am sometimes contacted by people from abroad who ask me to draw gift portraits of their Ukrainians wives, girlfriends or acquaintances. You can see some examples of such portraits on this blog too. There is an artwork ordered by an Italian guy who wanted me to create a portrait of his Ukrainian wife as an elf princess and another portrait created for an American man’s girlfriend living in Ukraine. This time, when a guy from Moscow asked me to create a portrait of his friend from Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, I thought why not to use this commission to show a little bit of Ukrainian culture to the world. So I made a video showing my work in progress and added a beautiful piece of Ukrainian music as a soundtrack to the video. And here are the results of my work. Hopefully, you will enjoy some Ukrainian spirit in this artwork.

Ukrainian girl portrait

Watch this video on Youtube

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Portrait of Young Michael Caine

I remember watching Michael Caine movies when I was very young. It may be that these souvenirs of youth made me want to draw a portrait of this well-known actor. Or may be I was charmed with the fact that Michael Caine will be 80 years old in 2013 and he still looks good and active.

Young Michael Caine wearing his signature hipster glasses

He still acts in many films. Michael Caine’s face looks rather attractive from artist’s perspective. Although he was born in a poor family, he has that peculiar British nobility in his appearance. Michael has a beautiful family and despite his solid age he even mastered Twitter. This active gentleman seems to have that irresistible aura that has inspired me to draw his portrait. So I found a picture of young Michael Caine that had been taken a year before my birthday and I used it as a reference for the portrait. Furthermore, this picture shows Michael wearing his famous hipster glasses; therefore I wanted to include this cool accessory into the portrait. I also learned from the Internet that one of Michael Caine’s favorite songs was “My Way” by Frank Sinatra. That’s why I decided that this great piece of music should be the soundtrack for my video showing the portrait creation process. I believe this song indeed perfectly fits a mature man who lived a long life of success. I hope Michael Caine himself will find this portrait and share his thoughts about it in the comment section below (well, I know it sounds almost impossible, but it doesn't hurt to dream).

Watch this video on Youtube

P.S. many people ask me what kind of pen I use for my artworks. For this portrait of Michael Caine I utilized one of my most appreciated drawing tools – a Pilot Birdie fountain pen.

Related posts:
John Wayne
Steven Spielberg
Hank Williams, Jr.
Johnny Cash
Michael Connelly

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Expanding My Team to Create Professional Vector Art

I started my career as a graphic artist with illustrations for archaeological digs in Crimea. I have been creating freehand artworks for a significant part of my life and even today, when artist’s business requires mastering graphic editing software such as Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator, I still gravitate to old school hand-made drawing. The majority of people start learning to draw or paint in a traditional way using conventional art tools such as paper and brushes or pencils. Doing so is natural. That’s why lots of old-schoolers proved to be unprepared for the digital era when all kinds of artworks can and sometimes must be created with the aid of special software and hardware like graphic tablets. I was lucky enough to have had the opportunity to learn how to utilize Adobe Photoshop to edit, outline or color my freehand sketches in order to turn them into digital pictures as well as how to work with Adobe Illustrator to create infinitely scalable vector images that are indispensable for many purposes dictated by technology advances of the twenty-first century.

In this blog you can find a few articles about projects which suggested applying my modest skills of creating vector images, for example, posts about the motocross vector illustrations, the panda mascot, and the posters for a chiropractor. However, when it comes to large projects involving vector graphics, I feel that my vector art skills are not strong enough for me to be able to offer my clients fast delivery and top-notch quality of images compared to artists whose major specialty is vector graphics. Therefore I decided to ask my former colleague to join me and become my associate in creating vector art for my customers who approach me with their big vector art projects. Her name is Natalia Busayeva. We used to work together for a web design and development agency, but today we both are freelance artists living in the same city. Natalia has acquired solid Adobe Illustrator skills which is exactly what I need to compensate for my lack of experience with vector graphics and meet my customers’ most challenging demands.

Our First Project Together: Vector Images Related to Sports and Hobbies

The first project Natalia worked on under the brand of Igor Lukyanov’s Artistic Studio was a series of vector pictures related to sports and hobbies. They were created for Split P Studio, LLC (owner of the "FunnyLuggageTags" trade mark) – my old client for whom I created custom drawings for the vintage-fashion-inspired luggage tags. These images were also purposed for a collection of luggage tags. As you can see from images below, vector art created by Natalia has a professional flair, even though I showed them in low resolution and they look not at their best here.

Male mountain biking

Female mountain biking

Fly fishing

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