a colorful portfolio

It’s wild how motivating the Good Morning watercolor journaling course has been, despite me not really following it. Every day I’m like “what should I watercolor today?” and I’ve been putting brush to paper most days. Sometimes twice a day—I’ll do something in the afternoon, and then in the evening I’ll watch a video that gives me a new idea, and I’ll start a new piece past midnight. Even on days I just sketch, it’s more than a perfunctory doodle at 1:50 am. Maybe it’s sketching out ideas for a watercolor piece or drawing along with a video. Even my freeform drawing feels richer because I’m so well fed.

But I am way off the rails. The last couple weeks of project drops haven’t yet spoken to me, and I’ve been out here freestyling. Lots of doodle blobbing lately. The monthly subject in the art server is birds, so I have birds on the brain. On two occasions I put down loose color and was like “oh that’s definitely a bird/birds” which would not have happened before.

The official projects I’ve done so far:

• complementary oranges (ft. tiny spirals hovering around the oranges)
• loose leaves (using the classic dio purple + ultramarine + cad orange combo)
• loose blooms (for the steel/nightshade/carrot g1 I subsequently bought)
• misty flowers (THREE versions: (1) wine loose leaves; (2) mashup with creationsceecee’s blueberry blooms & spirals; and (3) an actually soorta close version in lemon + shamrock + blackberry)
• green meadow (sunset meadow)

…and nothing past that point. Yet. Been eyeing the beach scene (I’ve never done a beach scene) and the Icelandic poppies.

My art folder for this year is so colorful and it makes me so happy. A nice change from my largely monochrome 2022-24 portfolio. It was weirdly dissonant, championing the lunar aesthetic in WD, having an all-colors chaos lair in FR, always suggesting colorful scries and praising bright terts, but having a black-and-white sketchbook. Colored pencils never clicked with me, though I tried hard to like them because I like color. Watercolor has opened up the world.

I can sorta feel my interest in watercolor-videos-as-entertainment starting to fade. My hobbies usually cycle. This focus on watercolor videos from August until now has been unusual. Last week I was doing my evening walking, and I was like “you know, I DON’T feel like watching another video” and instead picked up The Works of Vermin, which sat partially read in my Kindle for months. I finished the book the next day, and re-read like two-thirds of it, and then over the next few days I bought and read Caitlin Starling’s The Luminous Dead (meh) and Claire North’s Slow Gods (excellent). What can I say, I was hungry. I told myself to slow down on the book-buying, but I’m going up to brother's place this weekend so I should probably snag a book to have something to do in the evenings. Or I could just watch the new LMA vids. Well, we’ll see.