Hello everyone!

As you all know from my previous blog posts, art during the summer is HARD!

Thankfully I’ve been working, or at least forcing myself to. Of course, I take breaks when my brain needs it, but overall I try to even do a sketch a day so that I won’t fall behind once classes start again. Mostly I’ve been sketching, but I’ve also been watercoloring. In all honesty, since I love sketchbooks, I’ve actually just been doing more than one, but I have a specific watercolor sketchbook I’ve been using to do all these little landscape studies. I start with references, though some I’ve done in front of my subjects. I’ve also taken photos from some of my trips and used those as references.

My favorite thing to do would be to start off with watercolors, then grow on top of them by using gouache, or a more solid medium, such as pencils or acrylic. They’re really giving me a chance to grow and understand how things work in the world. Studies I find have been very important in teaching myself what I should be doing with each of my pieces. They also help me understand how to flatten out the 3-Dimensional world if I decide to go out and paint them in the real world.

I feel like I’ve come a long way with these, and I’m excited to see where I go to from here. I’m hoping I can become brave enough to do some things with linear perspective, more buildings, and eventually start adding people to these scenes. My goal with it is to learn to not be afraid of doing backgrounds. I find I’m pretty good at people, but I really want to learn to put my subjects in places, as well as build it up to a nice composition.

Thanks guys, have a great week!