last night during the debates and it up doing another watercolor painting. When I was sketching this, I was trying to simplify some of the forms. I was starting to feel like I was getting too technical and precise with certain things and I wanted the drawing to feel a little looser and fun.

I decided to try using watercolor once again. I'm really liking how these are turning out. I think it's funny when you are making something, at least for me, that I go through this phase of wanting to give up on the project at some point right in the middle. Especially when your painting, you get to a point where you gone beyond your drawing but you haven't come to a place where the painting is finished and you think that it looks like crap! But the magic comes when you go beyond that point. Once you keep working through past that point of crappiness, you end up with something that you're happy with most of the time. And sometimes that means starting over again or moving to a different medium. The happiness I got from the leaf girls paining I made in watercolor was after I had worked for a number of hours in acrylics and not liking what I had made. Then I also started a digital version as well that looked closer to what I was trying to achieve but it still just didn't feel right. When I finally moved to watercolor, I felt like the piece was coming together. But I don't know if I would've gotten there without going through that middle crappy phase that included working in two different mediums. So I'm gonna keep chugging along and I hope that if somebody else is reading this that it will keep them chugging along. Here's to going beyond crappy phases!

I will admit that I am still in the phase of discovering the different mediums that I can make my art in. My hope is that I continue to do this for the rest of my career but it's always fun to step into an area that you've never really tried before. I've never put a lot of time into working in watercolor but what is drawn me to a recently is this mix of control and lack of control. As an artist I've always started off with wanting a lot of control in my work so I've always relied on line. And trust me there's nothing wrong with relying on line to make your heart but for me it always felt safe and somehow constricting. I wanted to find a different sort of freedom and almost at discomfort in my work. Painting and more generically creating art is something magical for me because I can't see what I'm doing until I'm done and when I am done, I can't believe that I was the person that made that thing. This is especially true with watercolor. With watercolor, you have to give away some of your control to water and you can't be as meticulous and you can't constantly refine refine refine, but that's what is great about it! And it's why I am glad to be adding it to my Painting arsenal.

Once again I decide to use the Procreate app and this time I decided to make a digital portrait of Beck. After doing my afternoon study of Norman Rockwell digitally I decided to just have some fun and make a cartoony portrait of Beck since the girls and I have been listening to the song Wow lately.