After experiencing some success with plein air drawing (as detailed in the tree-drawing post), I was consumed by my own hubris and set out to assemble a field painting kit. This is a well-tread road, but I wanted something small enough to stuff into a backpack or fanny pack.
I cobbled together a kit with a mint tin palette and a small tupperware container for water. These are attached directly to the book with magnets: I used a pair of small neodymium magnets for the water container and a magnetic metal clip for the palette. This setup has been working out really well, even in situations where I'm sitting on the ground or somewhere similarly uneven. It's not great for standing work, though, since the water needs to stay perpendicular to the ground.
A gouache painting of a pine tree. The underpainting is burnt orange and visible underneath the layers of green. The sketchbook is also displayed with the palette and water container attached.
This is a reprint of my submission to Salad Magazine issue 3. Check out what everyone else submitted too!
An ink painting of a spilled ink bottle. (The bottle in the painting holds the ink that was used to paint it.) The spilled ink transitions into a painting of a starry night sky looming over a forest of deciduous trees. The trees and stars are reflected in a lake. The sky was created by dropping ink in water, resulting in abstract blooms that resemble clouds. Glitter varnish was brushed over the sky to create the stars.
I've been thinking about my sketchbook in terms of "how" instead of "what": I pick a medium or color palette I want to experiment with or improve at and dedicate the entire spread to that. It's helped me avoid succumbing to perfectionism-induced decision paralysis because I just think about cool stuff I want to try instead of getting stuck on making a pretty picture.
Drawings using one ink and water. Left: A coffee cup drawn with Diamine Pick Me Up, a brown ink, and Diamine Safari, an olive green ink, used to draw its own bottle. Right: A tree drawn with Rohrer & Klingner Alt-Goldgrün, another olive green ink.
I spent a few days doing the website equivalent of cleaning your house to avoid doing more important things — in my case, I rewrote the entire backend for this blog, made a cute new design for it, made a pile of color schemes for the cute new design, and rewrote some posts as I transferred them over. Whew! All of that without writing one blog post.
I've drafted and scrapped a few posts over the past month but felt generally unsatisfied with everything. I noticed as I was migrating posts that worshipping at the altar of long-form content had led me to pad posts out with verbose internet-recipe-style bullshit without realizing. That's not a stylistic choice I want to stick with! So the blog now accommodates what I will describe as "medium-form content." I can put cuts into longer posts to keep the front page from turning into an infinite scroll-y mess, but shorter posts can be displayed in their entirety.
I also signed up for Blaugust to see if external motivation/peer pressure will motivate me to get over myself and write more. This might be a terrible mistake since a new school year is starting (and I'm still working on that M.Ed while I toil in the salt mines for 50+ hour weeks) but I'll give it a go just on principle.
I've avoided dabbling in ink drawing without drafting with a pencil underneath because the thought of putting ink on the page without a plan fills me with irrational dread, but that changes now! (The avoidance is changing. No guarantees on the irrational dread.) This is also my first time doing plein air drawing, so there's excitement all around.
