Belvane's Book of Blunders complete! (art mega post)

It's been two months of constant Flow and excitement about watercolor. I'm binging tutorials, when I was in bed for a couple of days I realized that 'watching tutorials when you can't watch vids' is called books and got six and binged three, I spent an unholy amount of my monthly budget on supplies and I'm having as much fun as I had every time there came a period of wild inspiration like this - the last was the scrapbooking, and before that Blender filled that space for almost eight years (though it was less intense after 2018, perhaps for the best). 

Usually I sleep 16 hours a day (some medical thing) but when at the peak of excitement like this, which sometimes lasts months on end, I can get away with five or six. I'm having so much fun. 

However, this run is different to the ones before because it's been a great year, and my situation is the best it's ever been. The boyfriend; the financial safety; the lack of toxic family; those all make me feel as happy-ever-after as realistically possible.

I miss my streaming community, and feel a bit as if I betrayed them by getting burnt out with Blender and focusing on traditional crafts. Sometimes I contemplate streaming this, watercolor and composition and scrapbooking, but then I worry I'll disappoint people.

During the last two months I filled my first sketchbook ever. That is - I had heavens-know how many sketch books before, but they were traditionally flimsy notebooks filled with bad sketches in red pencil, and I was happy with hardly any of them; then I migrated to digital painting and never looked back. Now, however, I enjoy watercolor because I don't need to get good at it, and I don't much care what it is I'm painting, as long as it's aesthetically pleasing. So it's not the kind of sketchbook you try things in before you make the final - that's still in a flimsy school notebook full of messy notes - but it's the 40  pages where I glued anything watercolor that came out pretty. Or amusing; there's a few failures there, and I kept them because either they taught me something, or made me laugh. It also jas quite a few loose splotches and unimpressive things, just because it's fun to play with brushes and paint.

Goodness, I love growing older. Being free of all the self doubt and expectations of earlier years is so liberating I feel I could fly.

It took me two months to finish, and completing it was a drive on its own, though I don't understand why.

Do I upload half that sketchbook now? Is this going to be a mega post?

...It's going to be a mega post.

The whole 'practice book' idea comes from This vid by Andrea Nelson. She has incredible - and I don't use that word lightly - positive, charming energies, she feels genuine and I find she uplifted my spirit every time. This vid got me to start the practice book and make mistakes in it, and the first page is how she made hers. One day I might find the courage to thank her. 

There's no way I'm uploading the whole thing here; I'll select what I like most.

So here's the colourful mushrooms and blobs page, also following Andrea Nelson's guidance. That made me cheerful.

And the other side of this spread, which failed, as it looks nothing like the source and nothing like what I hoped for:

Then I learnt that 'doodles' are very aesthetic things that usually involve delicate, colourful watercolor with whimsical pen on top of it; First I saw it at Nianiani, then researched and found a whole genre which was new to me and enjoyable to explore. It started with the trees and a tube of paint I didn't know but realized I loved, which drove this whole double spread:

The next one is on a day I was dying to paint but couldn't think of anything enjoyable, so I drew what happened that day - another thing I learnt from people on Youtube. 

More whimsical trees,  because the colours are so pretty. The text there says as much, and the note at the bottom says 'today I'm simply happy'. I think it was the first Sunday I spent entirely alone, painting calmly in my sunlit white room with the cat purring next to me. 

The cat is the stupidest thing alive. It's paraplegic, which means it can't jump, but since it's too stupid to know or care, it's just a happy cat. It also climbs anything it can sink its nails into, so all the chairs, sofas and beds in the house. And seeing him walk around derpily, all happy as he drags his lower half behind him and lets it thump down the stairs, is hilarious. His name's Charles (like X-avier) and after over a year of living here he finally started trusting me and now we share a bed and cuddle a lot. He also pees on me on occasion. He doesn't care; neither do I.

Look at the adorable void behind those eyes.

Masking fluid! It's liquid latex you apply to the page with a (cheap, ruinable) brush, let it dry, then paint freely over it, then peel it and find it has protected thw white of the paper underneath, so suddenly keeping highlights is easy!

Tried to paint blueberries. Spent a while studying and analyzing them, planned the composition, and halfway though realized it bores me. I don't think I enjoy realistic painting anymore; there's AI for that. 

There were so many beautiful doodles on instagram, professional looking, inspiring and a bit misleading in the ease with which the artists seem to make them; I'm trying to find what's my own calm-your-mind easy doodle, but all my hand came up with was a bunch of elements I like. I ended up using this page to convey the joy at how great decent watercolors are, compared to the cheap fake I've used before that point. Winsor Newton Cotman feels so silky! The brush glides on the paper, the paint behaves, and getting a smooth wash was suddenly easy. 

Another genre of doodles is cute icons, usually of seasonal things like pumpkins and ghosts in October, mittens and Santa sticks in December, or just thematic things like 'at the beach' with fetching designs of beach toys and swimsuits and such. The genre appealed to me but not the topics, so I tried a few themed 'Medieval Medicine'. Turns out I'm not the best with icon design (I don't care) - but this page is one of my favourites because it expresses one of my core sentiments. 

 

Then I did the mistake of getting out of the house and bumped into an art store and bought an array of dry paint tubs and only when I got home did I realize they were all cute pastels. And to think that when I was 17 I was all faux-goth and though torment appealed to me. 

During the Friend's-Birthday-Weekend-of-Roleplaying I bought a small sketchbook and discoeverd the importance of decent paper, which it wasn't. That was like painting on a t-shirt - as in, it sucked the paint right in, and no blending or lifting could be done. Back at home I compared it to my regular 100% cotton, cold press Baohong (it's the most affordable good paper) and, well, that's this page:

Did I say I didn't want to paint realistically? I might have been wrong. Perhaps one day I'll manage to make beautiful, semi-realistic mushrooms that will also show all the beauty of transparent, airy watercolor; this here is how I don't want to do it...

Loose flowers. Pretty, and fun to paint. Tutorial by Emma Jane Lefebvre, whose Watercolor Month series of tutorials kept me afloat for an entire week. She's also a sweety, and I'd like to be able to thank her one day.

The other side of this spread:

Another bored page, but painting it was very relaxing and a good memory, as my boyfriend came to my room and was sorting his dice collection while I painted, and we listenet to the Buffy musical. What a great way to spend an evening. 

More relaxing, loose flowers:

And a page I made only because I wanted an entire spread with pink and gold. But I got better at finding things that come naturally for me to doodle:

Same painting, on the left with the fake paints, on the right with The Sacred Daniel Smith paints. I used to think they cost an arm and a leg, and then I discovered M Graham and Holbein, which are too expensive for me to want to get, but certainly made me feel grateful for Daniel Smith being more affordable. I don't know that it looks better, but it was much driendlier to work with.  

 

More following this tutoeial by Emma Jane Lefebvre: monochrome, and brush strokes. She specializes on florals. They're very pretty, and I enjoyed binging her channel, although I don't think florals is what excites me. I hope to find what is.

This isn't a particularly beautiful page, but it made a huge difference in my ability to easily sketch flowers - and all it took was drawing a whole page of loose practice, Peter Han style (he taught Dynamic Sketching back in 2013). From that moment on, flowers got easy.

Finishing Emma Jane Lefebvre's 31 days of Watercolor with a floral border tutorial:

And this, in Nianiani's style, which I painted when I wanted to paint but had no better ideas, because it's easy and relaxing. At the bottom are floral compositions by an Emma Lefebvre's tutorial, again. 

Here's another favourite page, because barring the candy (copied from Pinterest) the rest is entirely my own! Drawing stylized children was much harder than I thought, but I want to get better at it because that's something I do find appealing to draw. I want to get to a point it's easy. Still - proud of this one.

There's another thing I really like the aesthetic of - Arabian Nights. This page is mostly not mine - it's either tutorials or studies of other people's work - but it hits the right spot in my heart.

This was when I bumped into Anastasia Kozlova. It's hard to remember how it happened; ended up buying her book and been binging it ever since. She teaches very pretty watercolor decorated with pen; I follow her tutorial, then make an interpretation of my own to make sure I can use what I learnt. In this one, the central monstera leaf is the tutorial and the two on its sides are mine.

I'm usually picky with teachers; this one's a very decent teacher, and does it so methodically my organizing-loving soul sings. Here's the line index, which serves in all the paintings I learnt from her - the donut is the tutorial, the cupcake is my practice.

Another favourite page. The boat's the original, the umbrella my interpretation. For some reason I don't understand, this page makes me happy.

Look at the pretty palette Kozlova designed for this starfish! The conch is mine, and, having practiced identifying simple forms with Kozlova, translating it from photo to drawing was surprisingly easy and very satisfying. 

This is one before last, and the sillyness of so crudely combining the two unrelated tutorial images is what I enjoyed:

And the final page in the book, with no tutorials because I wanted to test the progress I achieved in two months of practice. It also very much expresses how finishing that book made me feel

There's a chance this mega post managed to convey how excited I am about watercolors at the moment. The second practice book is already in use, and since I post here quite rarely, the next time I write I might do another artdump. 

It feels very nice to be in traditional art again. Getting rid of the urge to be exceptionally good at it brought tons of relaxation and fun to my life.