Retrospectives

In August, I painted 15 paintings – well short of the nearly a-painting-a-day I had done in July and in the past few months. I’d been furiously painting to get ready for a community art sale where I sold a few paintings – for the first time ever! – but after that, I was feeling lazy. Also, I backed off from the National Parks Project at 75% done, feeling a bit depressed at the idea of painting Redwood while it’s on fire.

But! I have still been goofing around with paint. I tooled around with swatches and palettes, and I thought a lot about skies! I kept up with #skieswithjt on Instagram; and I made a real effort to improve my skies through observation and self-critique, in What to do with those old sunset photos? Paint ’em! The skies I painted after that post have turned out better!

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.

Read more

Goal Updates

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.

Read more