I was frankly appalled to realize that it’s been almost a year since I’ve updated or posted anything here on the site. I’m not sure why I’m so bad at keeping the site active. I went back and found missing art photos and have uploaded everything, adjusted the galleries, and now I’m making a post. I’d say that’s some flavor of progress. I told myself I wasn’t allowed to do anything else today (e.g. gaming) until this part was finished, so now here we are. I am proud of this little bit of success, at least. Next step is to do a better job of reading up on WooCommerce and seeing about getting the shop active to see about selling some paintings.
That part is still tough for me because I look at what I do and think “not bad” but then I look at what other artists are doing and think my art is simple and who would ever want to buy it. I tell myself that I can’t do that but I still do; it’s hard not to. But then part of me goes eff it, it’s what I do and that’s good enough, like it or not as you please.
Right now I’m into drawing lines on things. I’ve been doing these for a while now and I can see how they’ve evolved and grown over time and as I see other artists doing similar things. I look at what they are doing but try to do it my way, which has lead to some growth and changes that I like. I just wish I could come up with a name for these types of drawings/paintings because otherwise, I fall back onto my usual “Untitled (year-number)” failsystem.
For many of the latest line paintings, I’ve done them on tea stained watercolor paper. I wrote about this paper because it was horrible for actual watercolors, but marker, pen, and ink? The paper worked like a charm! I was moving some stuff around and looked at the jar I use for the tea and decided to do a quick session of staining, nothing too long because I didn’t want the paper too dark but did want some variation and texture.
Potential – watercolor papers waiting to be tea stained and then used.
I bought an inexpensive paper cutter a while back and it is one of the best things ever! It’s so much quicker to just pop the page into the cutter, then *swip* and done! A 15 in x 11 in page quickly becomes four 5.5 in x 7.5 in pieces and then I’m all ready to go. I can quickly and easily crop the paper down to size and have it ready to work on rather than hassle with marking points, then get out the cutting pad, metal ruler and knife to trim paper down.
Expanded potential – tea stained watercolor paper s waiting to be used.
Doing individual pieces can take a while, so instead I have some smaller lunch trays that were.. uh… liberated from the work cafeteria and are perfect for doing two pieces at a time. They are shallow enough to not need a lot of water to fill, but deep enough to get a few pages in at a time if I wanted. And I can easily tip the tea water back out to reuse if I want (yes, let it concentrate to make it darker like that). That meant I had the pages tea stained and dry, ready to use, the same day. I still have 2-3 pieces left of this batch pictured above and when those are done, well.. there’s still a few pages left in the pad of icky paper which can be pulled out, cropped, and then stained.