A few months ago, Nick sent me a link to the YouTube channel “Art with Flo.” A blog he was reading mentioned her “You Can Draw This” series that teaches you how to draw in Procreate on the iPad. Since I’ve had Procreate for a few years and have never really gotten beyond the basics, I thought I’d check it out.

I started with the donut tutorial above, and I was quickly hooked! I spent my next few weekends and evenings going through almost everything she had available on YouTube. I learned a lot, but wanted more! So I ended up backing her on Patreon. I’ve never backed a Patreon before, so I had no idea what to expect. But I’ve been really pleased! She puts out at least one tutorial every week. They come with a variety of things: you almost always get the swatches that she uses, in case you want to match what she’s doing exactly, sometimes there are new brushes (I’m pretty sure my brush library has doubled since I started her tutorials.), sometimes there are reference photos, sometimes study sheets, and sometimes she adds her Procreate file so that you can study what she’s done. It’s great!

My favorite tutorial so far has been the eye with rainbow makeup (I don’t remember the actual name of it, but you can see my version below). This is the best eye I’ve ever drawn in my entire life! I never thought I was capable of drawing things that are more photo-realistic, so it was nice to see that I can…well, when I follow the tutorial and match what Flo is doing, step by step. After this tutorial, I was inspired to do a self portrait, and the results were not what I was hoping for. But I did see an improvement over past self portraits, so that’s good!

I’m excited to follow along with the next tutorial, but also to practice more and get more familiar with the brushes and drawing on an iPad! I can only get better!

For a while now, I thought it would be really fun to do an art show. I’ve never had one, and an acquaintance’s husband got his art put up in a local coffee shop and had an opening party. It seemed like fun! And who doesn’t like a party? I wasn’t sure whether I would go as far to get my stuff put up somewhere public or just rearrange the garage and invite over some friends and family. But, details…those could wait. So last year, I took one day each month to devote to creating a new piece of art. My goal was to have 12 new pieces to put on display. And the event was going to take place in June.

So, about that art show… I had decided I wasn’t ready to put my stuff on display in public (I know. I’m a chicken). Nick and I usually try to do some sort of gathering at least once a year, so we decided the art show could be a part of that. And then Covid happened. And that made planning anything really difficult. Would the quarantine be over in time for the art show? If it was, would we feel comfortable having a group of people over at our house? Would other people be comfortable coming to our house? There were so many questions that didn’t have answers, so we decided it was best to just not plan at this point in time.

So maybe next year? But we’ll see. Nick and I have been rewatching The Office. After seeing the episode where Pam’s class has an art show and only a few people show up for Pam, and the other artists ridicule her stuff for not having a greater meaning behind it and just being random things she drew while at work, it’s made me rethink things. I have basically just painted a bunch of random things that I felt like painting that day. Some were photos I took that I thought would make nice paintings, and others were just random things I found on the internet that I wanted to paint. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s keeping me creative and upping my skills. But is that what I want for my art show? Or do I want something that is more meaningful that I feel truly expresses a part of who I am? Or do I just say, “F*** It!” and have a show with this art, and then in a few years, have another show that is more meaningful? I’m not sure. But even if I never put on a show with what I’ve created here, I’m glad I created it, and I can see how my skills have improved.

Most of these paintings were done with Gouache. Lately that seems to be my go-to medium. I used acrylics mostly when I was younger, but in college I really got into watercolors. Gouache seems to be a good in-between medium that I had never tried until I took my friend’s (Alison Nowak: https://www.alisonnowak.com, in case you are interested in taking a class from her. She is an awesome person, as well as a great teacher!) pet portrait painting class at MCAD. And I love that I can work in tandem on 2 paintings, as well as get something else done while I wait for everything to dry. It just seems like the most productive day ever!

The Koi Fish and Japanese Waterfall painting were done digitally in Procrate. That was really fun, and I’d like to explore that more as well. But I think I have been gravitating to the non-digital realm, since I spend so much of my life in the digital realm. It’s nice to take a break and just go old school. And it’s good to deal with not being able to hit undo all the time. If I make a mistake, I’m mostly stuck with it. Especially since watercolor and gouache tend to look worse the more you go in and try to fix mistakes.

Anyway. This is what I would have put up, had I had an art show this year. I hope you enjoy!

I finally did it…I switched my website over from a self-hosted site to a WordPress.com site. My old site needed an update…badly! The unfortunate thing that I learned from my last update, is that unless I buy a theme from the exact same developer, things will break when switching over because developers may code things differently. And learning how someone set up their new code and how to fix it to do what I wanted it to do was not interesting to me. Maybe another time, but not now. Now I want to create and post and not worry about the code. And I have had so many posts that I wanted to make, but since I was first planning and then in mid-switch, I didn’t want to take the time to post on two sites while they were simultaneously existing. And, I thought this was going to go a lot faster than what it did. So I just didn’t post.

The switch to WordPress.com was easy, but difficult. The easy part was backing everything up and porting it over. The difficult part was deciding which pricing tier to pay for and which theme to get. I was torn. One thing that drives me crazy about the new site is how it says, “Home” on the front page. But…I have to upgrade to the next tier in order to be able to get rid of that. Is it worth it to pay $4 extra per month on a website I don’t make any money off of, just to get rid of this ugliness? I wish I could tell you it was a no-brainer, and I quickly got over it. But it really bugged me! Eventually, my voice of reason won out, and I reminded myself that it isn’t as important what the site looks like. The content is what’s really important. Of course, if it looked like a site from the 90s, that would not be ok. But the WordPress free themes are ok for the most part, and I’m pleased with the overall look. And, all the other stuff that I really don’t like, I’m learning to deal with it. Because it’s not just the word “Home” that I don’t like…

I chose this specific theme because it takes advantage of the Portfolio feature in WordPress. I’m hoping that eventually more themes will use this feature, and when I need to update the site again, it will seamlessly switch. But we’ll see. Who knows? When I need to update again, maybe I’ll be all fired up to code again, and I’ll head back to self-hosting. You never know.

Wow! I just checked, and my last post was September of 2019! That was awhile ago. You may think that I haven’t been doing anything, and that’s why I haven’t posted, but that’s not true. I’ve been trying to spend at least one day per month creating art. For awhile I was doing a lot of gouache paintings. Then I moved on to painting some miniatures. I tried some digital painting as well. And work has been really busy. I’ve been working on some booth designing and learning 3D, which has been a challenge, but fun. And my newest endeavor has been learning to play the guitar! I’ve only been at it for about 2 months now, and I still sound horrible! But I am getting better. That’s good news for Nick, who sometimes hears me practicing!

The painting above is a gouache painting I did of a tree frog photo that I found online. It’s the most recent painting that I did, so I thought I would share it now.

I’m going to wrap this up now, but I’ll be back soon to share some of the stuff I’ve been doing and keep you updated with anything new I’ve gone on to! I hope you have all been well and are keeping yourselves safe.

Last year, I started a daily drawing, which I had planned to keep up for a year. I began with a list, and then supplemented it with an app so that I had choices, since the list seemed to be geared more towards photography and some concepts were difficult to complete in a smaller amount of time.

At first, I was doing all of my drawings before I went to bed each night. Which worked out ok, but then would cause me to stay up much later than I wanted, when I would get home later. So I then switched to morning drawings before leaving for work. The only bad part about that was if I really was getting into whatever I was drawing, my time was cut short. But it was also good to force a time limit, so I knew I had to get to drawing and not spend forever staring at a blank canvas.

For most of the year, I only missed drawings when I was out of town. But after the New Year, things all seemed to fall apart, and I barely did any drawings. I was trying to figure out why this happened, and I think it was because of my new job and improv. At my old job, I didn’t do much creative work. There were some opportunities for it, but it seemed that whenever something came up that I could help with, my workload got really busy, and I would get incredibly stressed out trying to figure out how I could get all of my work done (knowing it would take overtime to complete it), in addition to adding in a few hours to design something. At Chip Theory, I’m not not only doing more creative things every day, but I’m spending time with creative people and seeing the things that they are working on. Improv was also fulfilling that creativity need and helping me to think more quickly on my feet.

Most of my drawings were just quick sketches that were done in only a few minutes. Some of them I spent more time on, but I was more interested in the thought process and coming up with ideas more quickly. There wasn’t a drawing that stood out to me, so I just compiled a collection of drawings that I feel drawn to, for one reason or another.

Since I didn’t fully complete the entire year of drawing, I could see this project as a failure. But I don’t see it like that at all. I feel like the project was there for me when I needed it, and then I just didn’t need it anymore. I’m glad that I did it, and I’m excited to figure out what my next project might be!