watercolor Archives - ReveDreams.com

Botober 2021

I did another October drawing challenge this year! This time it was Botober, a set of AI-generated prompts. Actually, four sets. I selected one of the four lists’ entries each day to do.

Last year I designated a specific set of art supplies to use: pencil, pens, limited palette of markers, waterbrush. This year I did almost the opposite – I decided to use watercolor for all of them, but with any & all additional items I felt like including. And that worked very well, actually! Without making any deliberate effort (at least at first) I ended up trying several new techniques and combinations.

Crayon resist – the crayons kind of got away from me so I was pleased how well this came out in the end. I used a clear crayon from an egg-dyeing kit and a lavender Crayola, though it’s not clear the color is visible at all.

Dark forest with treetops shaped like starfish — Landscapes 1: Glowing, purple starfish forest

Masking fluid and lifting out with a circular stencil – I hadn’t used masking fluid much before. In fact, I may have only done experiments with it. This was inspired by a Karen Rice video, Bokeh Made Easy For Beginners.

Hazy forest with suggestion of mirrors hanging from branches, tall crystals emerging from the ground — Landscapes 7: Mirror forest filled with reflective crystals

Spatter (I’d done this before but never with any particular success)

3-tier fountain, each tier a half watermelon, a decorative watermelon slice on top and pink water flowing down — Halloween? 13: The watermelon fountain

Salt – I didn’t use any particular tutorial for this, though there’s a Scratchmade post about salt in watercolor. I used Morton’s table salt and the effect was decent, though instead of “granulated sugar coating” I got something more like “left in the break room for three days and dried out.”

Doughnut with eye and angry eyebrow, with jagged mouth/bite out showing red jelly — Animals 14: Angry jelly doughnut

More masking fluid, this time attempting to lift out in a halo around each dot before removing the masks (white lines are gouache)

Brightly-colored feathers standing on end with suggestion of a strand of white lights draped across the front — Landscapes 18: Forest of feather trees and shimmer lights

More lifting out, over top of a pale underpainting – I don’t know if lifting out is the appropriate term here. I took a paper towel and mopped up wet paint where the sheep bodies were, and used diluted gouache for their heads, legs, and tails.

Night scene with translucent sheep shapes and gravestones — Halloween 21: Mist-sheep chew on tombstones

Shaving watercolor pencil on wet paint with an emery board (the green in this is crayon) – I got this idea from a Karen Rice video. I don’t know that it was this video, but it’s a good introduction: Watercolour Special Effects Techniques Tutorial – Painting Pebbles

Green lawn with two brown holes, a pile of brown dirt next to each — Halloween? 31: Holes

There were some more compositional things I attempted as well, with mixed success.

Multiple attempts at perspective and appropriate shading (you know, we’ll get there)

Huge purple sphere floating in front of a house — Halloween? 3: Excuse me a minute a giant sphere

A bedroom with autumn oak leaves in twin beds, being tucked in by ants — Halloween? 3: Excuse me a minute a giant sphere

Negative-space teabags

Impression of a bird from two tea bags, the tags as open beak, strings as neck, and bags as wings — Halloween? 9: A flappy tea

My best Northern Lights attempt yet; also using a technique to try to show glow by giving the item a narrow halo of lightened background color

Tall blue-white glacier face with dark blue water below, sky above, and green Northern Lights — Landscapes 11: Noctilucent glaciers

“Tracers” effect (I soon realized my brain doesn’t actually know what happens when you slide a shape around on the page)

Bat with additional top-edge outlines repeated up and to the right — Halloween? 17: A bat bat bat bat bat bat bat bat bat bat bat

Shallow depth of focus (I actually like this one pretty well, except the flat gray silo sticks out like a sore thumb)

Farm scene with farmhouse in background, triangular teacups in foreground — Landscapes 25: Farm field covered with tiny triangular cups of tea

Let’s close with some favorites not already pictured…

Cartoonish walrus in rainbow colors over a nebula-like space background — Animals 2: Rainbow space walrus

Forest of large leaves of purple kale with emerald-green snake in foreground — Animals 2: Rainbow space walrus

My final tally was:
Halloween – 3
Halloween? – 8
Animals – 9
Landscapes – 11

It is a whole lot! I really like these drawing challenges. I have a prompt and a deadline, and the relentlessness of it means I can’t dilly-dally around – but one month a year is plenty.

Abundance, Scarcity, and Palette Design

A few years ago I wrote a post on my personal blog about creativity and ways to prompt it. The first two entries were “abundance” and “scarcity”. There is inspiration to be had from each: if materials are abundant you can experiment freely without worrying you’ll run out before you get to the “real” project; if materials are scarce – you’re limited to your existing stash – you’ll be forced to problem solve to make things work.

I was thinking about watercolor palettes one morning, as I often do, and realized the same principle applies there for me. A small set of paints is directive: mix everything you need out of these basics, or do without. It can get a little tedious to constantly mix everything, though, and uses up a lot of palette space to do so. On the other hand, a larger set of paints can be quick and easy, as you mostly use the paints directly without mixing. However, I find that sometimes I “forget” mixing is an option and feel stuck with exactly the paints I have, or alternatively, get bogged down trying to mix perfect colors in a way I wouldn’t if I had only a few paints to work from.

As with other instantiations of abundance and scarcity, the happy medium lies in alternating between them.

Currently I have one main palette and three mini palettes. You can fit 5 half pans in an Altoids Mini tin, and that’s what I use for mini palettes. The big palette is the kind that comes with 12 half pans but can easily fit 20, especially if you bend the insert a bit to widen the center area.

My main palette I call the Candy Palette. It is inspired primarily by 80s Memphis Design, neon graphics, and Lisa Frank, with some additional colors to give more mixing (in particular, neutralizing) options. It’s an evolving project; the Lisa Frank ice cream dog illustration was done with a “first draft” palette of only 11 colors. Twenty colors is its max size, but I do not anticipate it containing exactly the same 20 colors a year from now as it does now – and I look forward to finding out which colors will be replaced!

A painting of a dog on an ice cream cone, after the work of Lisa Frank

Painted copies of stickers from Lisa Frank and Highlights Magazine

One of my mini-palettes is metallics. It’s available for adding accents to a project, but I’ve been less interested in it than I anticipated. If I get more into the hypersaturated graphic design idea it may come into play more, and in that case I’ll likely swap out one of the silvers – they are way too similar to coexist in a selection this small.

One mini-palette is a standalone general-purpose mixing palette that predates all of the other palettes. It holds watercolor [approximations of] cyan, magenta, and yellow, plus sepia and what was supposed to be a darker, truer blue but isn’t really because of materials limitations at the time I made it.

painting: Happy Good Luck Fish says "Hullo!"

Finally, I have what I alternately refer to as the Dark Desaturated Palette and the Weird Desaturated Palette, my third mini-palette. It’s a standalone palette representing a twist on the CMY palette. It has Indigo, Naphthamide Maroon, and Yellow Ochre as “primaries”, plus Perylene Green because I love it and Van Dyck Brown as a sort of convenience color. White gouache is effectively a sixth color in this palette, as well. It is very…particular, but I quite like it.

Nebula and landscape painted with desaturated palette

The CMY palette has arguably been superseded by the Candy Palette, and I was thinking I’d replace it with a neutrals mini-palette. By which I meant, whatever neutrals I had on hand that weren’t in the Candy Palette, to add options for painting naturalistic images like birds. However, having thought about the abundance and scarcity idea again – and how cycling between them can be so beneficial to avoiding blocks – I’m interested in making another mini palette that stands alone.

But what? The experimentation has already begun.

Happy 10th Blogiversary, ReveDreams

Ten years ago today I made the first post on this blog. It was a brief Welcome post, with the first “real” post four days later: a bunch of animals I’d crocheted with embroidery floss.

Since then I’ve published something like 450 posts, with not quite 400 currently published after a cleanout a few years ago. Amigurumi crocheted from embroidery floss or yarn, with my own or others’ patterns; crochet outerwear and household items (including my basket fixation of a few years ago); a wide assortment of sewing projects including many pouches and bags; a surprising number of embroidery projects; and many one-off posts about other crafts I tried.

Of course, recently I haven’t published at all. My only post of 2020 was the inevitable mask-sewing post, and the majority of my 2019 posts were journal prompts rather than posts about things I’d made. I haven’t had the impulse to blog, probably in part because I can always share on Instagram, for far less effort.

However, I didn’t want my tenth blogiversary to go unmarked, so let me show you what I’ve been up to these past months…..

On New Year’s Day 2020 I started working on learning to draw. My previous attempt to learn to draw had been 5 years earlier, for the first few months of 2015. I don’t remember why I decided to make the new start – my journal is silent on the matter and my husband tells me I was admirably low-key about it – but this attempt has gone orders of magnitude better than the previous one. In particular, I am still doing it, and I’m pleased with my efforts.

Two drawing highlights of the last year-plus:

I started drawing a mushroom every day in my planner on Feb 4. This was inspired by a video by struthless, though my daily drawing subject was not nearly as specific as his. I’m continuing this year, with daily snails.

Colored pencil mushroom drawing from June 19 — Three mushrooms from my year of mushrooms: June 19 in colored pencil, March 10 and May 29 in ballpoint pen.

Ballpoint pen mushroom drawing from March 10 — Three mushrooms from my year of mushrooms: June 19 in colored pencil, March 10 and May 29 in ballpoint pen.

In October I did a daily drawing challenge, combining drawing prompts from Inktober, DoodleWash, and Creamtober with an overall theme of Fantasy Landscapes. It was a significant commitment but I was able to finish all 31 drawings within the month and I was really pleased with a number of them. My goal aesthetic was ink drawings with color accents, and while it took a while to get there I ended up with a few that were exactly what I envisioned.

October daily drawing supplies — First picture: my October gear, including waterbrush, fineliners, white gel pen, brush pen markers, eraser, washi tape, paper towel, zip pouch, and handmade sketchbook because I am extra like that.
Second picture: Outpost, 10/22 prompt “outpost”.
Third picture: Rock Garden, 10/27 prompt “crystal greenhouse”.
Fourth picture: Time Marches On, 10/21 prompt “crawl”.

October drawing "Outpost" — First picture: my October gear, including waterbrush, fineliners, white gel pen, brush pen markers, eraser, washi tape, paper towel, zip pouch, and handmade sketchbook because I am extra like that.
Second picture: Outpost, 10/22 prompt “outpost”.
Third picture: Rock Garden, 10/27 prompt “crystal greenhouse”.
Fourth picture: Time Marches On, 10/21 prompt “crawl”.

On January 18, 2020, I started watercolor painting, a fact I know only because I wrote it in my planner – again my journal has no mention of it, and there’s no photographic record. This was a product of having been watching watercolor tutorial videos on YouTube just for fun (though who knows where that came from!), taking an art class in January that included Japanese ink brush painting, and seeing watercolor feature in some of the drawing tutorials I was watching. I’ve painted versions of a lot of photographs and other illustrations, and done many video tutorials.

Two watercolor highlights of the last year-plus:

I have been gradually filling a sketchbook with animal paintings, mostly animals whose faces appeal to me. There are many pages left!

Watercolor and gouache jellyfish — Jellyfish (tinted white gouache on pre-painted blue background), Leaf Sheep (a kind of sea slug), and Moray Eel.

Watercolor leaf sheep (sea slug) — Jellyfish (tinted white gouache on pre-painted blue background), Leaf Sheep (a kind of sea slug), and Moray Eel.

Around the turn of the year I started painting overwrought planetscapes, the sort of thing you’d find on the cover of a science fiction paperback or prog rock album.

Watercolor planetscape with planet, moons, and apparent face in the sky — Two overwrought planetscapes using the same moody 5-color palette. For the first I also used white gouache, to make the moons/planets in the sky; sky face showed up on its own as a bonus. The second was based on two Skyrim screenshots – lesson: when compositing source images, think about where your light is coming from.

Watercolor plantescape with two moons and a river — Two overwrought planetscapes using the same moody 5-color palette. For the first I also used white gouache, to make the moons/planets in the sky; sky face showed up on its own as a bonus. The second was based on two Skyrim screenshots – lesson: when compositing source images, think about where your light is coming from.

And of course I sewed and crocheted, and did random other crafts in 2020. Many fabric masks, several zippered pouches, crocheted Christmas ornaments, my first-ever candle wreath, a set of tea shelves made from tea boxes, and my 2021 planner!

Homemade 2021 planner cover — Left to right: my 2021 planner cover, the June spread inside, and my tea shelves in their spot in the kitchen.

Homemade 2021 planner June month layour — Left to right: my 2021 planner cover, the June spread inside, and my tea shelves in their spot in the kitchen.

I think have a few more posts in me this year; although I’m clearly not holding myself to any posting minimum, I’m also not ready to shutter this blog.