double hobby

Weirdly, watercoloring has become two hobbies for me. The first is actually watercoloring. The second is watching watercolor tutorial videos on youtube. It’s a relaxing thing to do in the evening when trying to make step count for the day.

Most of these videos are plant-related: fall trees, pumpkins, loose florals, lemons… Plants seem like a natural strength for the medium. They’re so easy and look so good. And of course I see these techniques and want to try them out. But I’m doing dragontober this month. So I’m finding lots of ways to shoehorn dragons into plant paintings (or shoehorn plants into dragon paintings, depending on how you look at it). Orienne and Gwydion both have trees sprouting from their backs for no good reason. Cooper and Riboflavin got stuck in plant pots. Valentino has a bunch of gratuitous foliage on and around his bake sale stand. Kalausi got plonked into an entire fall landscape. Kris wears a foliage blind in game, which boosted him from “not on the radar” to “I must draw this dragon now.”

It's kinda comical. But it’s also neat to freely draw inspiration from tutorials while still making the end products uniquely mine. Nobody else is watching Sarah Cray’s ink-and-wash plant pot video and sticking dragons in the pots. Plus, the dragons’ colors gave me the palettes for the pots, so it was win-win.