Pencil Artist of the Week: Jekaterina Dancheva-Ustrikova

This week’s featured artist is Jekaterina Dancheva-Ustrikova, a pencil artist from Estonia who creates biological taxonomy drawings of fish, lizards and other wildlife. Jekaterina’s drawings would be right at home in the pages of a naturalist’s field notebook, and her tools are simple but effective.

“My tools are usually Derwent Watercolour pencils (I use them dry all the time though), and some sketches before June 2013 were done with Erich Krause pencils, because I did not yet know of a better alternative.

Graphite pencil used is a Koh-i-noor HB and B pencil, nothing unusual.

I try to use minimum colors. It comes from the period I was learning to paint Orthodox icons and understood that it is more effective to put bright chromatic colors over a “solid ground” of earth tones and only in limited amounts.”

Drawings by Pencil Artist Jekaterina Dancheva-Ustrikova

Pro tip: Jekaterina uses watercolor pencils dry to mute her colors. 

If you’d like to see more of Jekaterina’s drawings, you can check out her DeviantArt profile here. In addition to taxonomy drawings, she also sketches landscapes and vistas.

What do you thinks Pencils Blog readers? Do you know someone who should be featured as our Pencil Artist of the Week? Let us know in the comments or give us a shout on Twitter or Instagram @pencilscom!