2023 Annual Retrospective

I started painting in 2021, painted a lot more in 2022, and painted still more in 2023! This year, I’m especially grateful for the art friendships I’ve made – thanks to everyone who hangs out in my Discord! (Comment or DM me – @billyidyll on Instagram – if you want to be included!)

In 2023…

I painted every U.S. national park.

My major accomplishment was painting all 63 U.S. national parks from photos; this took me from February to November.

I started using gouache.

It’s hard to believe that this time last year, I was resolving to start using gouache in 2023! Although it took a bit of a learning curve, it became a regular part of my repertoire. Counting various tutorials from Ruth Wilshaw and multiple National Parks, I did 33 gouache paintings this year.

The National Parks project was actually started to help me work on my gouache, and while I ended up doing most of the scenes in watercolor, I do credit it with keeping me using gouache consistently since certain scenes just seemed to call out for it.

I began painting my own photos more.

Although the major theme of the year was painting from professional/stock photography, toward the second half of the year I began to gravitate more toward my own photos. Using my own photos typically adds a layer of complexity because I’m not a professional photographer, so often they’re flawed, and so there’s the extra challenge of not only making the painting like the photo but making it better.

Goals/Resolutions

Checking in on my 2023 resolutions

In last year’s retrospective post, A Year of Art! 2022 Retrospective/2023 Resolutions, I resolved to:

  • Try gouache: Check!
  • Paint from the tube: I didn’t do much of this. I tried it a bit, and I’ll do it if I want to use a color that I don’t have prepped in a pan, but I have found in general that I simply prefer to paint from a dry pan. Part of it is just that I’m used to it, but working from pans is just more convenient. You can do it on the go. You end up wasting a lot less paint, since you use the amount you use and naturally leave the rest for later. There’s less cleanup. It’s part of why I prefer watercolor to gouache. I think it is valuable that I learned this about myself!
  • Try different brush shapes: Again I almost went in the opposite direction here of doubling down on a smaller number of brush shapes! I tried to make a dagger brush work but I simply couldn’t get my head around the asymmetry. I have always had trouble with left and right. I also tried to use a rectangular brush, but found that I only really liked it for gouache; I get drybrush too quickly with watercolor, and I find a soft oval more useful for wetting the paper or painting big blocks of color.
  • Spontaneous painting: Didn’t even try it. Ha!

I’m not very good at resolutions.

2024 Resolutions

2023’s (failed) resolutions focused on moving in a looser direction, but I found myself instead moving in a more detailed direction. Let’s see if it’s more helpful to lean into that impulse.

  • Use my regular paper sketchbook more/draw more thumbnails. While I rarely remember to do it, it’s really useful to do some planning sketches ahead on regular paper before doing the larger undersketch on watercolor paper. I’m used to painting from a polished photo and using the same composition as the original photo. But as I move toward using bad photos or composites of multiple photos, taking an extra planning step to work out the composition is a really good idea.
  • Use smaller brushes to create more contrast in stroke size. One thing I’ve started to notice about my landscapes is that my tendency to use the same, relatively large (8-10) round brush for everything is starting to get in my way, especially when it comes to details, which can look rough and ham-handed with a large brush. I need to remind myself to use smaller brushes, like a #3 round or #2 liner, for more delicate details such as tree branches.
  • Give masking fluid another try. I swore off masking fluid after my first attempt because the ammonia fumes triggered my migraine, but there are ammonia-free masking fluids. This could support my desire to make more detailed paintings by allowing me to mark off small, sharp white spaces; currently my main method is to do gouache after the fact, which doesn’t always give me the effect I want.
  • Don’t buy paint this year. Okay. This is the one that I suspect may be hardest for me and that has the most potential to positively impact my life, by saving me money and convincing me that I don’t need to spend to enjoy this hobby. I don’t begrudge anyone buying paint but I personally have enough by any scale. (I still have about 3 months of Color Spotlights scheduled to go up, but the series should finally end in 2024.)

2024 Challenges/Collections

While I’m not good at resolutions, I am good at challenges. “I resolve to paint all the US national parks” isn’t on the 2023 list (in part because I didn’t think of it until February), but it is a more concrete thing I was able to accomplish. Here are some challenges or series I want to either start or continue in 2024:

  • My Birding Life List. I didn’t put it together into a challenge or theme until recently, but I have occasionally been painting birds. I’d like to make it a goal to paint one of each bird on my “life list,” which currently stands at 200 birds. I’ll be at it for a while!
  • My photography archives. One idle task I’ve taken to (as a replacement for doomscrolling) is going through my photo archives, deleting photos I don’t need, and marking others as “Painting Potential.” These photos don’t have to be good enough to share on their own, they just need to spark a bit of interest and curiosity in me. The next step is to actually paint them!
  • Canada’s National Parks. I’m still a bit exhausted from the USA effort (and this doesn’t align with my general desire to paint more scenes with personal meaning to me, such as my own memories/photos and birds I’ve seen), so I’m not sure I’ll start on this soon. But I learned a lot about USA’s National Parks through my paintings, and I want to learn Canada’s National Parks!

I do not expect to finish any of these by year end, especially if I do all of them. Actually, the birds and my own photos are ongoing because I keep adding to both lists!

All the paintings

In previous end-of-year lookbacks, My 2021 Sketchbook and My 2022 Sketchbook: All The Paintings of the Year, I actually posted all the paintings I’d done that year on one post! This year, I knew that would be too much and crash the page, so I did my galleries month-by-month this year. If you want to see all the paintings I did in 2023, check out these monthly posts:

3 thoughts on “2023 Annual Retrospective”

  1. Hello Billy,
    I started wanting to try watercolor recently, and searching for which colors to put in my first “artist grade” palette.
    I’m very grateful of what you share here. Thank you for all your blog posts: colors reviews and how they mix have been super helpful for my researches. And your art is so inspiring (especially your wonderful, colorful gradients in skies! Make me want to try too!)!
    I lived in Vancouver some years ago, and it’s nice to see it and the surrounding nature through your paintings.
    I wish you all the best for 2024, and all the years to come.

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