Watercolor Dirtbag
I started June attending a live remote class: dynamic skies with Leslie Lambert. This set the stage for month of skies! I continued doing the #skieswithjt weekly challenge by @jthomasart_ on instagram, which I started right at the end of May. I also continued my ongoing National Parks project. And I did some other paintings … Read more
One neat thing about working from my own reference photos is that they don’t need to be perfect or even good. They can have all sorts of flaws that would ordinarily exempt it from being an artistic piece of photography: poor composition, stray detail, boring bits. They just need to have one intriguing thing that … Read more
May is Warbler Month in Massachusetts – the best month of the year for birding because exciting birds are briefly traveling through on their northward migration, singing and carrying on. (There’s also a fall migration, but because it’s shorter and quiet, I rarely see anything.) I was excited about the birds I was seeing and … Read more
At the beginning of 2023, I posted my 2022 “sketchbook” (i.e. all my paintings of 2022, whether they were actually in a sketchbook or not). For completion’s sake, I decided to go back in time and do 2021. This is the year I started painting, so I can’t go back any further than that!
It’s a trip to look back through these two years later, because I have such specific memories associated with each one!
The theme of this month was spring! I built my Spring Palette and painted some swatches and paintings – indoors and out – using spring colors and themes. Focusing more on my actual surroundings, I took a break from my National Park project until late in the month (then rapidly did four). It was an … Read more
This month, though I didn’t have any subscription services, I took a Domestika gouache class from Ruth Wilshaw, a one-day Grand Tetons class from Shelby Thayne, and a watercolor triad class from Jane Blundell through Art Toolkit (output not pictured below, since I did swatches instead of “full paintings”, but you can find the results in my post Watercolor Triads). I also made progress on my project to paint a scene from all 59 National Parks in the USA (from photo references). I opened it up from a gouache project to a gouache or watercolor project, and did ten total – six in watercolor and four in gouache.
Below, you’ll find all 20 paintings that I did in March.
In January, I set a February goal and prompty forgot it! Evidently, I was supposed to not spend money, but I did. I bought a few paints. Oh well. On the plus side, I did cancel all my monthly fees/classes (Kolbie Blume’s Artist Co-op, Claire Giordano’s Adventure Art Academy, Skillshare). I’ve enjoyed all of these subscriptions, but I found myself falling further and further behind, and feeling like they were chores/sources of FOMO instead of fun. I also was feeling like I didn’t have time to do my own thing, and that some of my favorite random paintings come from just being bored, which I wasn’t letting myself do. So it was mostly time-related, but it didn’t help that it was all a continuous small drain on my bank account. So while I’m still doing the occasional one-off class, I’m going without subscriptions! I was kind of afraid to cut the cord, but I have to admit I feel more free than regretful, and I’m in no hurry to jump back into a commitment. I’m just going to see what happens for a bit.
Goal-setting is evidently not working super well, and it’s already well into March as I write this, so I’m not going to set one for this month. I think it’s more fun to identify a month theme in retrospect, anyway.
One of my first watercolor challenges I ever did was Kolbie Blume’s Painting the Wilderness challenge in fall 2021 (I did it about a month after it premiered), and in summer 2022 I painted along in real time to their follow-up Seascapes challenge. In February 2023, it was time for round 3: World of Color! … Read more
I’m working my way through Kolbie Blume’s Intermediate Landscapes course; last time, I discussed module one, on light. In this post, I’ll share my paintings from the color theory section. The Paintings Complementary Snowy Mountain Loved Learned Split-Complementary River Sunset I consciously chose to differ from Kolbie’s color choices and make mine more like the … Read more
Kolbie Blume’s new 10-Day Challenge, World of Color, starts today! I thought it would be a fun public service for anyone else who is participating to present my mapping table of color alternatives to the colors Kolbie indicated using in their Supplies video. Slot Kolbie Uses Alternatives Yellow WN Lemon Yellow Deep (PY159) – unusual … Read more