going off-recipe

There’s a recurring online meme of people who don’t follow recipes and then complain about the results. For instance, “I thought this recipe sounded good but had too much fat, so I reduced the fat by two-thirds and replaced the eggs with applesauce and replaced the breadcrumbs with chia seeds and it turned out terrible. 0 stars.” Then people make fun of them for not following the recipe.

The thing is, when it comes to art, going off-recipe is kinda how it’s supposed to work. It’s art. It’s all about self-expression. So it makes sense to say, “I really liked the Green Meadow tutorial. I swapped out the greens for a sunset palette and adjusted the composition to have one large tree instead of smaller trees on the right and left. And I tried the technique of swiping down for hanging foliage, but it didn’t turn out how I wanted, so I went over it with my foliage brush. And I don’t have bleedproof white so I just ad-libbed the flowers in the grass. Great tutorial, would recommend.”

At what point does an art piece stop being “from a tutorial”? Well, I’m not that fixated on labels. It was definitely inspired by the tutorial. Maybe that’s the right term to use. It’s a Cray-inspired landscape. Actually Sarah’s painting was itself inspired by the work of Laivi Poder, so you know, we’re just all playing artist telephone out here.

In the past I’ve never thought much about style. I just draw stuff I like. But this whole watercolor jag has been (among other things) a deep dive into the process and preferences of other artists, and it’s made me realize I do have a style. It’s bold, vibrant, whimsical, and generally unconcerned with actual colors of objects. It’s obviously very vg-influenced. My version of “seasonal painting” is e.g. when we were fighting Vamp Fatale and I started doodling fat bats everywhere. All this nature stuff is new to me (and fun and exciting). It’s wild to me that I can just sit down and paint a landscape. It genuinely feels like a superpower. My visual vocabulary when it comes to the natural world is very much WIP. Sarah is always like “You don’t have to paint a particular flower. You can just make up flowers.” I try to make up a flower and I just feel lost. I could make up a robot though.

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edit (3/29): Another instance of going off-recipe: A few days ago, newbie was playing Death Stranding and stayed in a private room that was wine-colored with chartreuse/lime highlights. Most people with taste would dismiss this color scheme out of hand, but I was like, hmm.

So this morning, I was like “what should I watercolor?” and this chimera came out:

• Wine/chartreuse color scheme (though the “chartreuse” dried more lemony than I expected)
• Overall composition from Sarah’s “Misty Flowers” (the OG has a very aesthetic palette of blush + spruce with background notes of overcast and indigo)
• Flowers are lupins from last night’s 1 am doodle session
• Leaves are based on willow leaves, my “default leaf” because of the willows back home, and compositionally influenced by Sarah’s “Loose Leaves” (“what if Loose Leaves, but with a background?”)
• Then I hot-dropped in a bunch of viridian and dio purple for fun.

Fun stuff. I’ll likely return to Misty Flowers at some point to try out a different palette and a more realistic style (the OG is a lot more realistic).