A story of one hyacinth

Last spring I got a bulb of hyacinth at the store and drew it in my sketchbook. I followed it's growth and all kinds of changes - from new smells to a nasty fall. I used all kinds of materials. And then I left for a trip and did not have a chance to draw the last part of this flower's journey. 

But I hope to see it's offspring next year.

Sketchbook 120

I like my blog.

I wrote a post at the end of 2018 about how I will change my relationship with it. Over 6 month later I have 20 posts and a large backlog of things I want to blog about backed by hundreds of sketches.

I kept skipping some weeks of posting by using a simpler instant gratification of instagram which automatically posts to facebook. A few clicks and I am done. But not satisfied.

I like my blog because I can search for things here and can look at them in the order that I created these posts and see all of them and not what some computer picked to keep people looking at the screen longer. I can see a bigger picture and how my works and interests evolve.

So I devised yet another strategy to keep myself on the topic here. But first - a little bit of catching up and some announcements and explanations are due :)

Some of my projects will have to be hidden from the public eye from now on, some subjects will disappear completely (or almost completely) and some will be more open. I will keep fuller and organized folders with the sketchbook pages (those that I want to share publicly) on my Flickr. But I will add links to the folders in the posts here.

And I will continue this journal of my journaling :)

Here is a quick screenshot of the sketchbook 120.

June as a month of mini gouaches

June was the month of 30x30directwatercolor challenge which was hosted this year by Marc Holmes (who created this challenge a couple of years ago) and Uma Kelkar. A whole bunch of people worked through 30 days of June without using lines with the watercolors (visit the FB page!), and I did the same with gouache.

You can view all of these here:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/23173190@N07/albums/72157709417718421

Things that were helpful:
1. Having a mini gouache kit (se photo below) ready in my pocket most of the time so that even 5 minutes while running errands might give me a change to make a tiny sketch.
2. Not having either pencil or pen in that kit to avoid temptation.
3. Separating painting these little gouaches from all other stuff (after a few days the idea of doing something else in my sketchbook was too inviting)
4. Organizing some time to paint something in a completely different technique or with different materials.
5. Setting my expectations low enough so that even a couple of strawberries would work as a subjects or a very fast and wet in wet sketch of the flowers would still count. Ultra small size paintings (1.5" x 1" literally). Some days are like that and I have to be OK with it in order to survive.

Things I wish I did differently:
1. I think having more people and pets as subjects would be a lot of fun.
2. I think I would enjoy working on larger pieces next time.
3. I think next year I will try and do it with watercolors actually. Gouache allows for corrections through it's opaque nature and it took some edge of the challenge for me.

See how I did this challenge last year:
https://blog.apple-pine.com/2018/07/30x30-direct-watercolor-challenge-at.html
https://blog.apple-pine.com/search?q=30+mini+gouaches

here is my very portable gouache kit: