Last year I designated a specific set of art supplies to use: pencil, pens, limited palette of markers, waterbrush. This year I did almost the opposite – I decided to use watercolor for all of them, but with any & all additional items I felt like including. And that worked very well, actually! Without making any deliberate effort (at least at first) I ended up trying several new techniques and combinations.

Crayon resist – the crayons kind of got away from me so I was pleased how well this came out in the end. I used a clear crayon from an egg-dyeing kit and a lavender Crayola, though it’s not clear the color is visible at all.

Masking fluid and lifting out with a circular stencil – I hadn’t used masking fluid much before. In fact, I may have only done experiments with it. This was inspired by a Karen Rice video, Bokeh Made Easy For Beginners.

Spatter (I’d done this before but never with any particular success)

Salt – I didn’t use any particular tutorial for this, though there’s a Scratchmade post about salt in watercolor. I used Morton’s table salt and the effect was decent, though instead of “granulated sugar coating” I got something more like “left in the break room for three days and dried out.”

More masking fluid, this time attempting to lift out in a halo around each dot before removing the masks (white lines are gouache)

More lifting out, over top of a pale underpainting – I don’t know if lifting out is the appropriate term here. I took a paper towel and mopped up wet paint where the sheep bodies were, and used diluted gouache for their heads, legs, and tails.

Shaving watercolor pencil on wet paint with an emery board (the green in this is crayon) – I got this idea from a Karen Rice video. I don’t know that it was this video, but it’s a good introduction: Watercolour Special Effects Techniques Tutorial – Painting Pebbles

There were some more compositional things I attempted as well, with mixed success.

Multiple attempts at perspective and appropriate shading (you know, we’ll get there)

Negative-space teabags

My best Northern Lights attempt yet; also using a technique to try to show glow by giving the item a narrow halo of lightened background color

“Tracers” effect (I soon realized my brain doesn’t actually know what happens when you slide a shape around on the page)

Shallow depth of focus (I actually like this one pretty well, except the flat gray silo sticks out like a sore thumb)

Let’s close with some favorites not already pictured…

My final tally was:
Halloween – 3
Halloween? – 8
Animals – 9
Landscapes – 11

It is a whole lot! I really like these drawing challenges. I have a prompt and a deadline, and the relentlessness of it means I can’t dilly-dally around – but one month a year is plenty.

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I was thinking about watercolor palettes one morning, as I often do, and realized the same principle applies there for me. A small set of paints is directive: mix everything you need out of these basics, or do without. It can get a little tedious to constantly mix everything, though, and uses up a lot of palette space to do so. On the other hand, a larger set of paints can be quick and easy, as you mostly use the paints directly without mixing. However, I find that sometimes I “forget” mixing is an option and feel stuck with exactly the paints I have, or alternatively, get bogged down trying to mix perfect colors in a way I wouldn’t if I had only a few paints to work from.

As with other instantiations of abundance and scarcity, the happy medium lies in alternating between them.

Currently I have one main palette and three mini palettes. You can fit 5 half pans in an Altoids Mini tin, and that’s what I use for mini palettes. The big palette is the kind that comes with 12 half pans but can easily fit 20, especially if you bend the insert a bit to widen the center area.

My main palette I call the Candy Palette. It is inspired primarily by 80s Memphis Design, neon graphics, and Lisa Frank, with some additional colors to give more mixing (in particular, neutralizing) options. It’s an evolving project; the Lisa Frank ice cream dog illustration was done with a “first draft” palette of only 11 colors. Twenty colors is its max size, but I do not anticipate it containing exactly the same 20 colors a year from now as it does now – and I look forward to finding out which colors will be replaced!

One of my mini-palettes is metallics. It’s available for adding accents to a project, but I’ve been less interested in it than I anticipated. If I get more into the hypersaturated graphic design idea it may come into play more, and in that case I’ll likely swap out one of the silvers – they are way too similar to coexist in a selection this small.

One mini-palette is a standalone general-purpose mixing palette that predates all of the other palettes. It holds watercolor [approximations of] cyan, magenta, and yellow, plus sepia and what was supposed to be a darker, truer blue but isn’t really because of materials limitations at the time I made it.

Finally, I have what I alternately refer to as the Dark Desaturated Palette and the Weird Desaturated Palette, my third mini-palette. It’s a standalone palette representing a twist on the CMY palette. It has Indigo, Naphthamide Maroon, and Yellow Ochre as “primaries”, plus Perylene Green because I love it and Van Dyck Brown as a sort of convenience color. White gouache is effectively a sixth color in this palette, as well. It is very…particular, but I quite like it.

The CMY palette has arguably been superseded by the Candy Palette, and I was thinking I’d replace it with a neutrals mini-palette. By which I meant, whatever neutrals I had on hand that weren’t in the Candy Palette, to add options for painting naturalistic images like birds. However, having thought about the abundance and scarcity idea again – and how cycling between them can be so beneficial to avoiding blocks – I’m interested in making another mini palette that stands alone.

But what? The experimentation has already begun.

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Since then I’ve published something like 450 posts, with not quite 400 currently published after a cleanout a few years ago. Amigurumi crocheted from embroidery floss or yarn, with my own or others’ patterns; crochet outerwear and household items (including my basket fixation of a few years ago); a wide assortment of sewing projects including many pouches and bags; a surprising number of embroidery projects; and many one-off posts about other crafts I tried.

Of course, recently I haven’t published at all. My only post of 2020 was the inevitable mask-sewing post, and the majority of my 2019 posts were journal prompts rather than posts about things I’d made. I haven’t had the impulse to blog, probably in part because I can always share on Instagram, for far less effort.

However, I didn’t want my tenth blogiversary to go unmarked, so let me show you what I’ve been up to these past months…..

On New Year’s Day 2020 I started working on learning to draw. My previous attempt to learn to draw had been 5 years earlier, for the first few months of 2015. I don’t remember why I decided to make the new start – my journal is silent on the matter and my husband tells me I was admirably low-key about it – but this attempt has gone orders of magnitude better than the previous one. In particular, I am still doing it, and I’m pleased with my efforts.

Two drawing highlights of the last year-plus:

I started drawing a mushroom every day in my planner on Feb 4. This was inspired by a video by struthless, though my daily drawing subject was not nearly as specific as his. I’m continuing this year, with daily snails.

In October I did a daily drawing challenge, combining drawing prompts from Inktober, DoodleWash, and Creamtober with an overall theme of Fantasy Landscapes. It was a significant commitment but I was able to finish all 31 drawings within the month and I was really pleased with a number of them. My goal aesthetic was ink drawings with color accents, and while it took a while to get there I ended up with a few that were exactly what I envisioned.

On January 18, 2020, I started watercolor painting, a fact I know only because I wrote it in my planner – again my journal has no mention of it, and there’s no photographic record. This was a product of having been watching watercolor tutorial videos on YouTube just for fun (though who knows where that came from!), taking an art class in January that included Japanese ink brush painting, and seeing watercolor feature in some of the drawing tutorials I was watching. I’ve painted versions of a lot of photographs and other illustrations, and done many video tutorials.

Two watercolor highlights of the last year-plus:

I have been gradually filling a sketchbook with animal paintings, mostly animals whose faces appeal to me. There are many pages left!

Around the turn of the year I started painting overwrought planetscapes, the sort of thing you’d find on the cover of a science fiction paperback or prog rock album.

And of course I sewed and crocheted, and did random other crafts in 2020. Many fabric masks, several zippered pouches, crocheted Christmas ornaments, my first-ever candle wreath, a set of tea shelves made from tea boxes, and my 2021 planner!

I think have a few more posts in me this year; although I’m clearly not holding myself to any posting minimum, I’m also not ready to shutter this blog.

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