I've been asked by a few people if I always draw from nature. If it is possible, I do sketch from nature from the beginning to the very end, but I also sometimes mix/complete them using photo references. Some of the pictures though, especially illustrations, are pure interpretations of photographs. I tend to use my own travel archives in most of the cases, if it's not something iconic as common poses/buildings etc - then Google comes helpful. I wouldn't recommend relying on photos completely when learning to draw, but I can't see anything wrong with using modern technologies. 
So I'm sharing new #dogpeople pieces with the references I used when creating them.

Andy is still bravely fighting the basics of Russian language, quite a progress since when he couldn't even pronounce Р и Ы, so proud! And I'm still trying to pretend that Russian is easy and fun. Not sure how will I manage that with the cases, but to help him to learn new words I made these rhymes and illustrated each of them. Decided to start with "food" theme.

In these series I wanted to show my response to migrants/refugees/foreigners theme that is so frequently on news, through a methaphor of migrants feeding birds, that are themselves migrants from faraway countries. It illustrates the good saying that we all are foreigners somewhere. 
There's compassion and care in that gesture of feeding, helping, and so many more questions were raised in my head when thinking of this comparison. Most importantly I wanted this methaphor to light up the problem in a positive way, no matter how sad I feel about boarders subject sometimes.