thanksgiving cards & retrospective on dragontober

Last Tuesday I noticed they already set up the big Christmas tree across from the train station. Bros, please. It’s not Thanksgiving yet. Have some class.

This weekend I’m heading to a pre-Thanksgiving family get-together (since people are visiting other family for Thanksgiving). I made watercolor Thanksgiving cards for everyone just because. It started out with just one card for BB. In this house, we love the very hungry caterpillar. (“hedapeda ate too much food!!”) But there are six cards in the pack…so then I made a card for brother…and then of course I had to make one for Mom and Dad.

Both their postcards are landscapes. For brother, I did a sunset forest with maximally simple composition: sunset in the back, purple foliage in front. My trees have improved a ton since this watercolor jag began, although admittedly it’s much easier in monochrome. Then Mom and Dad got a firefly forest (sans fireflies).

I’m reveling in my newfound ability to make landscapes. It’s very cool to be able to make pictures from color alone. At the same time, I’m figuring out ways to integrate watercolor with my usual illustrative style. That’s pretty much what dragontober was about. A month-long exploration of composition, with varying levels of success. My favorites are Valentino (a “proper” illustrated scene of him sitting at his bake sale) and Coop/Riboflavin (loose ink-and-wash where I stuck the dragons in plant pots). I also like Bloop (lineart with eyes closed) and Varel (bust) as basic compositions that turned out visually pleasing. My least favorite is Kalausi. That painting had SO many problems, not least of which was the fact he was just plonked into a fall landscape. No interaction, no thematic significance, the colors don’t even really match. Also it looks like I colored the whole thing with tabasco sauce. I blame it being like 87 degrees in the house at the time.

No regrets though! The whole thing is a learning process. I feel like I learned much more about trees from my Kalausi picture than, say, my Gwydion picture, where the trees were adequate but not notable either way.