A relaxing day of painting

Spending the day doing nothing but painting turned out to have been a great decision; I think I might have overloaded my brain with extensive studies - because I'm so excited about watercolor I want to learn everything, at once - and the break to simply put brush to paper left me feeling rejuvenated.

I'm still working my way through Jennifer Lefevre's book, though after over a month of doing most exercises there it's now possible for me to start improvising, not copying the tutorial. That's very satisfying. 

The one on the left isn't finished, but it needs to dry a few hours before the next part, which is some glazing; if I do it now it might re-activate the first paint layer and just smear it into a mess.

Since watercolor has to dry all the time, I find it's best to simultaneously work on three painting so when one needs to try I can switch to another. So I got to practice various smaller woodland plants in my practice sketchbook, which is one with cheap wood pulp paper that doesn't give you heartburn to waste.

To draw anything properly I'm supposed to analyze its shape and practice it with a pen and shading and stuff, but most of the time I'm too lazy and trade good results for fun. It's nice not to have the pressure to be good. 

This was a very nice day. 

Blender like it's 2022!

Yesterday I Blendered for 16 hours. It was glorious. It's how it used to be in  2016-2023 around 70% of the time, this near-feverish excitement and time just vanishing; it's not that I like Blendering any less, but I'm obsessed with watercolor, and less involved in World of Warcraft. 

But it's a commission for a person I like and think highly of, and it's his gift for a woman I like and think highly of, and he's honoring me by choosing me to make this, so I'm on a roll. 

  

 

Editing the human male model to not look like a beefcake is something I did in the past, but not very well. Now that I look at it, the shape edit I spent hours on looks a bit like a blood elf; maybe I should have started with a belf body instead. Problem is, I've done that in the past too and the shape is so recognizably belfish that an experienced Warcraft roleplayer might think the character is a half elf, or a dracthyr. Anyway, I think this model now looks alright, and thank you, Michael Hampton, for that anatomy class in 2013.

Detailing the outfit was meditative. Somewhere around 2018 I told someone 'wouldn't it be wonderful if one day I could make the whole painted texture into 3D objects?', and nowadays I can, it's just time consuming - and, frankly, somethings it's a compositional mistake. Warcraft models, outfits and items are visually loud as it is; making things more detailed creates more visual clutter, which is the #1 mistake in people's Wow Blender art. 

But I guess most of those artists are like me - detailing every bit of texture to make it real scratches some perfectionism itch. It also makes taking commissions into something which isn't cost-effective, but I suspect most people don't do outfit detailing because of money. It's a passion thing. 

There was the usual polishing of the models themselves, changing materials into metal or velvet and generating normal maps; there was replacing the painted rose and buckles for 3D models, and then the heavy load, which is cutting the painted outfit pieces like the waistcoat, and then the waistcoat trim, and the buttons (though for the buttons I just used the pocket watch). Then doing the same for the silver on the boots. Then pulling the waistcoat away from the body to make it drape like a garment, not like glued-on wallpaper. I also brought in a cravat from another model and spent a couple of hours tweaking it before realizing it (a) made things too cluttered around the likely focal point, aka the face, and (b) doing it right would require pulling the Huion painting tablet out of the storage so I can manually paint over the texture, which I don't want to do. So the cravat idea has been shelfed for now. 

Then... the hair. You'd think that ten years of making particle hair and commissions and an asset library would make it fast and easy, but for me it never did. I didn't have that hairdo ready, I did have a beard ready but the it still gave me issues because I forgot a couple of modifiers, and at the end I wished I could kick Blender in the shins, for my flawed workflow. It's always easy to blame Blender. 

That done and approved by the client/friend, I got to the other character.

The wedding dress is a texture from 2004. I spent around three hours cutting the lace into actual holes, and separating dress parts like the corset and belt, and then realized it looked like crap. It's pixelated even though I upscaled the texture with Topaz Gigapixel (that software used to give great results but now they're mediocre at best); The sleeves are a very new model and that style clashes with the low-res wedding dress texture; so I'll have to figure out another solution. 

But not today; while I enjoyed the Flow-type blendering very much, today I'm chilling with watercolor. I didn't even put any music on; It's soft autumn sun pouring through the window, the calming silence, the cat napping on the chair to my left, and the pigment spreading in water. This is very nice.

Painting foresty things, and some blendering!

 It's still hard to believe how nice and peaceful life is, for the past two years. Can experience ever be taught? Can I save someone else decades of unhappiness by saying 'you don't actually have mental issues; maybe your parent is toxic and you live in daily fear, get therapy to help you cut them off and you will find out you're actually sane, and a rather optimistic, happy person'?

It's not the romantic love. I had three very good, sweet and fulfilling loves in my life (the two marriages, and the one non-sex-but-absolutely-romantic love with a woman, in 2020-2024) - and each made life infinitely better, but never removed the cause. The cause was dad. 

I never thought the death of someone I love would be what made me feel free and happy. I never thought the parents I loved, who loved me, were also the direct and daily maintenance of my depression. That's so weird. 

Life is very nice now. 

--

It's another thing to understand, too - they were toxic to me, and I was just as toxic to others. To many people around me; until I got the right therapy in 2016. Many apologies have been said since, and some friendships were saved. I wish I hadn't been that kind of person. 

--

This is becoming such a maudlin entry, and it was unplanned. I actually picked up the diary to write that I'm still painting nonstop, even though I stopped posting in social media because... well, I forgot. I think it might be because it's more fun to spend the time painting than posting. And my art is crap, it's crap in a bucket, but I don't care. It's the process that I enjoy, and the feeling of my brain exercising. I enjoy the mental effort, even if it's very different, and more subtle, to what I felt when I did 3D art.

This month I binged Painting the Secrets of the Forest with Watercolors by @jenny_illustrations, whose art is wonderful and instructions are lacking. It was a frustrating experience, but the art is so beautiful that I couldn't put it down. The issue is, of course, that while I'm learning a ton from painting all the book's tutorials, it's not really my art. I can't take credit for it, so posting it in the regular social media feels like dishonesty, so I don't. This being my diary, with its grand total of one reader, and after this disclaimer, I  feel it's okay to show a bit ‐ so here's some of it:

 

 

  

 

Gorgeous designs, aren't they? I wish I could come up with such beautiful story pieces of my own. And I've no idea how to get there. It was all much easier when I was drawing roleplaying stuff from all the D&D campaigns, but I'm not good enough an artist; accurate stuff like characters or items isn't easy for me to paint, and when I do, it's hardly ever good enough in my opinion. So no characters, no items, no accurate stuff - which means I have no idea what I want to paint. It's like I don't have an inner world. How odd to think that, after all those years of thinking I was imaginative.

--

Yesterday a friend asked for a Blender commission. I don't take them nowadays; I'm way too obsessed with watercolor to have time for Blender. But it's a friend, and it's a wedding surprise for his soon to be spouse, and I like them both a lot, so I want to make the picture; not as a favour to them, but rather because I'm honored he wants me to make something this meaningful. 

So today I'm doing something unusual - I'm blendering! And (a) it's like riding a bike, but (b) the bike is hella rusty and I'm trudging my way through it like a soaked fluffy dog in a swamp. Somewhere in the back of my mind this slowness is frustrating - it always has been - but this is the first time I can recall where I'm on Ritalin while I blender, and the medicine dulls the frustration - it's as if yes, it's annoying, but the annoyance is over there. It's not actually inside me. 

I shouldn't be on Ritalin (plus caffeine and a Red Bull, which I drank as well, as if I was a nutty teenager) at midnight, but I'm enjoying the blendering while alone in the house so much that sleep will wait. I've spent the past 15 years oversleeping, so being wakeful and productive is a pleasure I learnt to be very grateful for.

(The sleep lab actually discovered I have a super common thing called sleep apnea which might be the cause for the chronic tiredness, and there's simple stuff that can be done about that, which is awesome and I'll do it soon, and goodness, modern medicine is awesome.)

--

There's more I wanted to write about, mainly about having made myself an online gallery for watercolor art - it's belvane.art, can you believe it? Who'd have thank it was available? And the point isn't that I have a gallery, but how it was made; this post, however, is a bit too long as it is - and Blender is calling. I'll gush about making the site another day. 

It's nice to Blender again. I wish I had time for all the things I'm excited about doing. And it's really nice to be excited about stuff, and have the peace of mind to be able to indulge in it all. 

Marriage, sketchbook, and attention-demanding events

Today is, suddenly, very busy.

Maybe I should start with yesterday; we got married. It was just the two of us signing some papers with the judge approving it; it's the most one can do here if we eschew religious marriage. After the divorce, in 2018, it felt like my life had ended; it was my Blender community that kept me afloat during the four years it took to heal. And now I'm glad my life didn't end then; the best two of my entire 49 years of life, have been these last two - with my second-love-of-my-life, and without the daily toxicity of my dad. One death, one love, and my life was... fixed. It's... if I believed in higher powers I'd call it a miracle. 

We got 10$ fake-gold rings on Aliexpress, had no ceremony nor public celebration. It was quiet, private and great. 

-

Then my brother (63) got hospitalized again; it's been a month now since a minor sinusitis surgery that got an unfortunate and dangerous complication, on top of which there's an infection. Bro's been in and out of the hospital for one to two weeks each time. There's not much to do apart from giving it time and waiting. So we do. I send him silly memes twice a day.

-

Then my new husband took me to an art shop and told me to binge whatever, as a late birthday present, and I did, and now I have many exciting new toys like more granulating watercolor, and excellent colored pencils, some low-grade paper and silly acrylic inks I can drip into water and watch the paint spread, which is so therapeutic I plan to give it to my brother when he's released so he can relax with it. So I hopped to see him today, but only for ten minutes because he hates visitors. It's the first I see him since this started, and... well, not much to say, just wait. 

-

We went to have breakfast in some nice place with the kids this morning, to so-called celebrate the wedding (but actually just to spend nice time with the kids). It was sweet and quiet and celebratory. Then that brief visit to my brother, and...

Then Noogie wrote to me that her father died this morning. She lives abroad, but her parents live - lived - in the same city as I do. She's flying back to this country today, so she might crash at ours for a few; I love  Noogie, and my heart aches for her.

Those swings from joy to sorrow are confusing. It feels like a busy day.

-

So I'm sitting quietly in my room and drawing with new pencils and trying to let the emotions flow through, do what they need. I'm not upset, as none of the bad things are happening to me directly, and the good things were done in small enough a scale to be nice and not a big emotional wave (one of the reasons we chose not to tell people, not even close friends); but I think that one more stimulation and I might feel it all, so thank heavens for drawing. 

-

Flower painting is boring for me, both to see or to paint, but the challenge of figuring out the shapes and being able to draw them from any angle, that's... well, I don't enjoy it, per se, but I feel I need to do it to practice fundamental drawing skills so I can paint whatever I do want to paint, if I ever find what that is. So the practice sketchbook is full of analyzing notes and failed leaves:

And a practice page for the anemone's cauline leaves, whose shape I find tricky to comprehend for some reason:

And the inevitable experiment spread - this time it's rock salt on various watercolor consistencies:

There's something liberating at being a watercolor noob that doesn't have to prove anything. I feel free to suck at it, which makes it far more fun than painting something I care about, or that needs to serve a purple, like the numerous tabletop roleplaying campaign art I painted from age 14 until 38, when Blender consumed me. 

Blender at with Warcraft was incredible fun too; an entirely different challenge, that got my brain feeling like it was exercising every day. It was amazing, because at points it was so hard and when I managed to figure things out on my own it was a dopamine explosion which, I believe, was one of the reasons I never wanted to stop - and neither do many other people who get into it. 

But in 2023 that medical thing happened it kept me preoccupied for two years, and I neglected my community, and couldn't play Warcraft, and... and somehow, when the new love came and the bad stuff left and I healed, somehow using my hands to craft physical thing had a whole new allure. It's not only the need to create something beautiful (which is the main drive, rendering the content of said beauty almost irrelevant) - it's that there's a joy of the senses, the physical feeling of a brush on paper, the pigment spreading in water... a physical sensation experience, that's what it is. And Blender doesn't have that. 

And Blender was addictive, consuming, stimulating and great to take my mind off things; but painting with brush and pencil has a... it feels like the opposite of stimulation. There is no mental engagement or friction; it's... zen.

Which is why I'm sitting here, drawing boring flowers (as said, what I paint hardly matters, it's the action that does), and letting the quiet wash over me, and my body soak the pretty colors of the pencils, the sunlight streaming through the window, and the idiot cripple cat's whining outside my door.

Is there any better way to end a post, regardless of the fact that this is mostly an art blog? Surely not.

Watercolor experiments! Which masking tape keeps clear edges?

My intention, when I started the Instagram account, was to use it as an art diary; but the interface isn't 4k-word-article friendly, and I'm too embarrassed to post five reels about how excited I am with today's watercolor experiments. 

It's still weird to me that my delve into the Paint The Secrets Of The Forest turned into filling an experiments sketchbook. A practice-book turned everything-book. Maybe I got a bit burnt out with the serious stuff; it feels good to paint noncommittal nonsense right now. 

Besides, yesterday I couldn't paint anything serious because I was Tired. Hear that capital T? It's because I've been Tired since 2013, with being able to sleep 15 hours a day, but in the past five years it got silly: get Tired an hour after waking up, be too tired to do more than the essentials for the next three hours, go to back to sleep. Having only four hours of wakefulness every day is ridiculous, but! Two weeks ago I stumbled upon a possible way to handle it and have been enjoying having so much time again, and today some sleep-test results came in and apparently I got Old People Sleep Issues which can be solved with Magical Medical Gear! So hopefully soon I'll have a normal life again.

Actually, between doing Pilates thrice a week, to losing 20 kgs with meds (I'm still obese though), to peace of mind, healthy relationship and feeling (being?) safe, my life's more normal than it's been in years. Certainly since the divorce in 2018. I'm also the happiest I've ever been in my life, and have been for two years now. At the age of 49! With years of depression in my baggage! To think that I might have missed on all that, if the depression had won!

But I was about to ramble about watercolor - so since I was Tired yesterday I couldn't paint, but still wanted to play with color and brushes, so I tested masking tapes. Explanation for Watercolor-muggles: Paper buckles when wet, right? Even thick watercolor paper. So you use painter's tape to adhere it to a board before painting. That tape also creates nice, clean, straight borders for your art.

If you don't want to pay extra for a tape just because someone called it 'painter's' you can use regular masking tape, but it might rip your paper. And if you're a girly girl who doesn't care that washi tape is (a) flimsy and (b) expensive, you can use that - but when I use it in scrapbooking it peels so easily I never bothered to try it as a resist on watercolor paper. 'Resist' means 'not letting any watercolor leak under it and ruin your edges'.

The results weren't what I'd expected! The best was the washi tape (wtf), and the worst was Paul Rubens, an artist's tape designed specifically to keep the paper's edges spill-free. What a fail.

The two under it are industrial masking tape from Aliexpress, a different tape from a local hardware store, a washi tape that didn't do so well, and then the medieval-art looking washi tape I thought was too exotic and tiny and detailed to use in scrapbooking, and turns out to keep the neatest edges in all of neatland! 

So I got to splash pretty colors on papers and swish around with a brush and learn something while at it. Time not wasted.

That put me in the mood for experiments, so today I tested two things I keep failing at - the salt effect, and blending medium ratio; but I just realized it's midnight, and I'm tired - note the lack of capital T there, this is normal, human tiredness - hooray! - so the excitement about the other two experiments will wait for the next post. In the meantime, here's a random page where I tried to figure out the shape of lesser celandine flowers.

This writing-not-in-private-and-being-excited-in-my-journal thing is nice. I hope I keep it up.

That practice book just... happened

It's been a while since I stayed up doing stuff full-steam through the night, not for lack of having stuff to be excited about, but thanks to having a normative sleep cycle (more on that another time, maybe). But it's five in the morning, and I've been playing with paint and pens all night, and it fills me with happiness. 

'What is it good for?' asks dad's voice in my head. Dad died last year, but his comments live rent-free in there. Well, dad, it's good for my happiness. It makes me happy. It fills me with joy and purpose and it feels like some external being is driving my hands to make things, and doesn't bother consulting my mind about it. In short, dad, it's excitement and inspiration. And fun.

The other week I needed to test some very low-quality watercolor ink, which I did in a very low-quality watercolor sketchbook I had lying around since the days I knew even less about watercolor paper. Once that was tested (vibrant, staining, probably as lightfast as a puddle in the Sahara), used it to test some gold powder; the following day was playing with paint and relaxing without thinking about the result so naturally that was done in that same sketchbook, because why waste expensive Baohong paper on doodles; then some experiments with brush lettering, bound to fail so that cheap book was the choice again; then before I knew it I had filled ten spreads in one week. 

Turns out it's very liberating to work on cheap paper with cheap paints, because I worry less about producing something impressive, and just... learn. It's exactly the same as it was when I was 25 and got a super-sucky sketchbook to doodle anatomy with red pencil in; it made my technique rocket. I've no idea why I didn't do that earlier with the watercolor. 

Perhaps because watercolor does depend a whole lot on high-quality paper, so there's stuff it's silly to practice on wood-pulp paper - like diffusions, gradients, delicate blending, anything accurate or that requires vibrant colors. But for stuff like analyzing leaf shapes, or the structure of a letter / animal / plant, it's great. I even tried some gimmicky stuff in it, like splatters or overlaying watercolor pencils on the painting. I think that, playing in that lousy sketchbook this week, I figured out more things than I usually do in two months. 

And it's such good practice, too! Suddenly I'm implementing techniques I knew but never had the chance to try, because they're too scary to use on expensive paper. This feels very satisfying, and makes me very happy.

--

On another note, my Instagram feed is swamped with autumn-themed art, from fiery leaves to scarves and tea to all things Halloween. In this country September is still summer, which is my favorite season; ample light, comfortable light clothes, the pool when I dare, and not being cold. That whole autumn celebration exploding on September 1st feels like an offence to the cheery 32 Celsius out the window, so here's today's doodle - it's actually practicing single brushstroke leaves, but apparently my seasonal agenda needed an outlet.

--

And last - that brush lettering attempt. 

When I was 16 mum caught me painting at 3AM and was displeased, but I was so excited about heavens-knows-what-it-was. That scene repeated for years with minute variations, and the core of it was that the excitement kept me from falling asleep, even if I was knackered. It was drawing, then painting, then writing roleplaying stories, then LARPing, then digital painting, sewing, Blender, coaching, and now painting again. And it's half past five in the morning, and it's been around a year of being so excited about watercolor that it's the thing I imagine while I'm falling asleep. Just like with Blender before, sleep is upsetting because it keeps me from doing that thing, that... obsession. And the obsession has many facets (if you ever did Blender you know what I mean) and I want to try all of them, right now, and it's fun but also frustrating and unhealthy and sometimes it feels like I'm being chased by a non-lethal wall of fire. I'm not sure what will happen when that wall of fire catches up with me; the inspiration will fade, perhaps? It feels as if... there's limited time, and so much I want to experiment with. It doesn't matter that the result is sucky; it's the doing it that matters.

So brush lettering. 

 --

So that book suddenly needed a name; it had turned from 'donate this' to a wonderful creativity engine. Even, or because, it's full of crappy art. 

The last one is called Belvane's Book of Blunders, so there's a convention to follow. And I had an excuse to fill that first page, and to spend two full hours on the absolutely useless, delightful attempt to write that font with my own hand, with pen on paper. What's that good for? Nothing, dad. Nothing but having fun. I know fun doesn't count for anything, but since you're not around to do much about it, then useless fun with calligraphy I will have. 

Life is currently quite nice. I rather wish I was a believer so I could thank someone for that.  

Finally managed diffusions with wet on wet! And some life updates

 

It's been five months since last I felt the need to write something public. Perhaps that's because my regular, private diary satisfies most of the thought-organization need; or perhaps because there's too many social media channels for my taste, and it feels like either a job or advertisement, not sharing my thoughts.

Anything about life, Blender and such is at the end of this post; the rest is me being excited about watercolor.

Watercolor excitement

But today I really want to share excitement about a technical art discovery, just like I used to feel when I regularly did Blender. So I'm still obsessed with watercolor, and it's nearly a year now, and I enjoy plodding my way through figuring it out without any clear goal except enjoying the challenge. And one of the constant challenges was that I couldn't keep the paint on the paper wet. All the books and tutorials show beautiful diffusions of one paint blending into another, of different transparencies with the same color, and mine, no matter how fast I worked, got dry withing seconds, not minutes. Ten, fifteen seconds tops.

Imagine, in a tutorial: the painter draws a wet brush with green to paint a thin stalk, washes the brush a bit and extends tine branches from that stalk, which come out a charming, transparent green and blend in a gradient. They then touch the split points with a brush thick with pigment, which explodes in the wet water channel painted on the paper to deepen that area with a new color, seamlessly blending with the existing ones. Like the yellow in this moment, in this tutorial.

Having failed at that for around four months, and came up with various theories as to the reason, I finally managed it! So the reason is, as expected, the fact that I live in a very dry area (the Middle East) compared to where most of the tutorials and books are made (Western Europe or the more European-weather of the US). I also have constant air condition in my study, so it's all very dry.

The solution was two things!

1. Blending Medium. It kept the paint mixture wet for longer, but also made it sluggish; took me a while to realize I need to mix it with water (1:1) and dip my brush in that before I pick up the paint. 
2. Having painted my first wet layer with that mixture, I recently learnt that if my brush isn't wet enough - aka doesn't have enough water on it, not only wet pigment - the paint just won't travel! Even if I touch the brush to a pre-wet, Blending-Mediumed layer on my paper!

As soon as I had the right water-medium ratio on my paper, and the right amount of water on my brush, the paint exploded pleasingly in it, and the base layer remained wet for around a minute - still not close to how the tutorials people have it, but plenty of time to create the gorgeous diffusions I was smitten with. The first that caught my eye (and heart!) with this was Mirglis - look at those diffusions! The tension in my shoulders fades just looking at that:

Art by Mirglis, aka Sarah Van Der Linden

So I'm excited and happy and I want to be painting 24/7, that is, I spend 100% of my waking hours wishing I was painting with watercolor.

Anything which isn't watercolor - Blender, life and everything

I miss Blender, but I'm so obsessed with watercolor that there's no time left for Blendering. Between sharing a house with my man and his two kids, to being bedridden around 70% of every day (I'd rather not go into that), there's around 4 hours a day for me to do anything in - including cooking, showering and spending time with my man. I even joined a Warcraft guild, which had a super-nice leader and some people I wish I had more time to get to know, but... no time.

I miss Blender; I miss my Blender community even more. I feel that I let them down by not resuming regular streaming. But so little time, and right now my enthusiasm burns, the way it can only burn for ADHD people with hyperfocus, for watercolor. 

Life is very good. Having started doing Pilates thrice a week, a lot of physical problems just vanished! Including the limp from that leg surgery in Thailand in 2023, can you believe it? As long as I do Pilates, the pain doesn't return and not only can I walk normally, I even chug the staircases on the house with no effort. I can bend and move and rotate and twist and it's like someone shaved 20 years off my body, despite the obesity.

About the obesity - something wonderful happened; I learnt to accept it. It's like magic. I can't say I'm thrilled to be 150kgs, but I don't feel mortally ashamed about it anymore, and last month I even wore a swimsuit in public for three hours and forgot about my body, just enjoyed the pool, the sun, and making loads of conversation with strangers. 

Mounjaro, the weight-keeping injection, makes me nauseated and sleepy for two days each week, and costs 350€ a month, and it's still a blessing. When I was 170 kgs I couldn't handle basic bodily functions and was miserable to no end. Those 20 kgs that the injections peeled off me, combined with Pilates, gave me my well-being back. 

--

If all goes well, in three weeks the man and I will do the signing of legal papers that declare us married (for all practical purposes). Since the divorce from the last one has been dragging since 2018 and isn't done yet, there might be a situation where I can say I have a harem! With two intelligent, hilarious, talented, beautiful, geeky men I'm married to! I don't think I ever imagined that kind of situation. And I really hope the divorce is done at some point soon; it seems both the ex and I are displeased with how long the legal part is taking. 

--

There's a cat. I'm sure I wrote about that in the past. His name is Charles Weasley-Xavier, because he's a paraplegic ginger with an attitude and no brain. He's also paranoid. I'd have never taken in a pet, as it wrecks my heart when they die (lesson learnt from the family cat passing when I was 11), but since I moved into a house with a cat I just have to accept it, and gods above, the amount of joy that derpy, brainless cat brings into my life is off the scale. In the past two months we got him sleeping with us in bed at night, and falling asleep with a purring cat next to my face, under my hand, is another kind of joy entirely. 

Charlie can't evacuate his bladder and bowels on his own, so boyfriend manually empties him once a day; at night we put a diaper on him, since that one time we discovered that, while he sleeps and dreams, he actually does pee. It's a spray, really. Right on my face. It was either cry of laugh, so I'm laughing. 

He's my Smol Happiness. Boyfriend is Tall happiness. And life... life is just good.

--

It's peaceful. It's fulfilling. I laugh endlessly, because boyfriend is hilarious. I'm at peace with my body. My health is annoying on the well-being front but it's not dangerous nor suffering, and, being 50 and obese, I'm grateful it's only that. And who knows, with enough Pilates maybe I'll be able to dance again? Imagine that!

But I do, I do miss my Blender community and Blendering. If I could add one thing to my life, that would be it. Not even roleplaying; the Blendering gang and streams.

And until I can be bothered to add those links here, if you want more constant (and less deep) life-bits from me, I (currently) post art on social media quite regularly: Instagram, Blue Sky, Twitter (don't give me that X nonsense).

--

This art has no pretty diffusions yet, but I hope the next post will have one that does. Until next time... 

Watercolor, War and Wedding

Right! So what happened since the last post, on January 21st?

For the past ten days there's war with Iran, so lots of missile sirens, running to the bomb shelter and waiting for the boom. Not me; I mean, I certainly wait for the boom, but I don't run to the shelter, not on account of unique bravery but on account of having a bum knee, and if I rush down three flights of stairs seven times a day, I'll end up hospitalized. So boyfriend and his kids rush to the shelter, while I remain up here with the cat and hope for the best. 

There's some anxiety there, I won't deny it; but it's quite small on account of my trademark unrealistic optimism (or denial). But there are significant benefits to not having to drop everything and run to spend half an hour in a cold, stuffy small space with eight neighbors some of which you really don't enjoy (the top-volume radio news from their phones, mainly). First, whatever I'm in the middle of doing isn't interrupted. Second, no cold and smelly and half an hour of discomfort. Just a brief wondering of 'is this it for me?' between the siren and the boom, and worrying about the boyfriend, who's spirit is slowly being whittled down by the interruptions and stress.

I hope the war ends soon; the people in Iran are in a far worse situation than us (this isn't a hate war between peoples, it's a hate war between the government's ideologies). For us this is (so far) discomfort; for them it's all the horrors of war, like you see in the movies, with a government that mostly kills its own citizens. Were I a religious person, I'd be praying for the Iranians. 

So that was the most dramatic news. Other than that - I'm still obsessed with watercolor, though I used to paint all day every day and had to stop for five weeks for a throat! Infection! Fudge! That! I had no idea a simple winter strep could knock me out for over a month. Now it's gone I'm back to my happy obsession, and, as a bonus, it turns out that when I play with my watercolor I forget about the war. Turns out all those tutorial people saying 'watercolor is good for your mental health' have a point. 

So here's the spread I'm working on tonight, with the two random-archaeology-items on the right and the beetles on the left. It's not a lot of painting proper, the spread designs - but it scratches the completionist itch, and I have at least one friend who says it's very aesthetic and pleasing, which is enough to motivate me.

It's been forty five years of making art; I started when I could hold a marker, did lots of colored pencils and acrylic during highschool, some oils later, switched to digital with photoshop when I was twenty, stuck to that until 36, then discovered Blender and 3D and dropped all things painting for eight years, because Blender was much more fun. 

Thing is, now that I'm back to painting, I'm not doing it for the sake of creating an image I have in my mind; nowadays that can be done witn AI, and infinitely better than I'll ever be able to. I paint because it's fun, which leads me to my current problem: I don't know what I like to paint. 

It's been around all my life, people using prompts and inktobers and fanart100 and so on, and I never got it; I never lacked for things to draw or paint, because I was roleplaying in various tabletop D&D (or MERP, or Vampire, or Freestyle, or 7th Sea, or Amber Diceless, or Victorian Occult) campaigns, and nothing sets my inspiration on fire like roleplaying. I've not roleplayed for a couple of years now, though - life's too busy, and full of nice things - so no inspiration, and no friends to please with my art...

(Actually, there is a small Cthulhu campaign - but not only am I the GM, and not only do we meet once in a blue moon, also one of the three players is a proper artists, a tattoo artist and person who truly paints for passion and makes my drawings look like a child's doodles.)

Which brings me back to I don't know what I like to paint. All the tutorials have flowers, leaves, cute animals, cute random doodles, eye-pleasing abstract art, scenery or what I call 'kindergarten projects', which is anyone-can-do-this happy splashing of paint in a sketchbook. None of those appeal to me, and I think that only today I got what they all miss: Narrative. I need a story to excite me to paint something. It doesn't need to be much, but it needs to be more than just aesthetic or fun to make. Which is a stupid reason to get stuck and not painting, but there you have it. 

Oh, one more thing happened - boyfriend proposed! 

Behold my magnificent ring of 14 carat plastic, accidentally sent to boyfriend years ago from Aliexpress instead of the Lego Millenium Falcon mount he ordered! We're properly engaged though, which means somewhen in the upcoming months we'll hop over to the lawyer to sign papers and make it official.It turns out one can actually have two loves of one's life (though, in most cases and this one too, not simultaneously). 

And last... I really miss Blender. Watercolor paint is fun and addictive and I love it, but I do wish I had a Warcraft-art Blender commission or two. It's been to long. 

It's already been five hours without a missile alarm; perhaps the bombers in Iran are having a good night's sleep. One can hope.