My 51^st acrylic is a nocturne of the Christmas fair at Hebden Bridge, which we visited in 2018. I got into how the night suggests rather than displays things, and really got into the depths of the lights on the tree. There's no razzle dazzle in this work, but I feel like maybe there's some honesty about a night I remember fondly.



My tenth gouache is a horned owl in the snow. This was my first time using an angle brush — I only recently picked up a few of those, in both bristle and soft synthetic — and I really enjoyed how it handled. I can see myself using them a lot in future. And, once again, the limited palette I have felt my way into for animal paintings came in handy here.

My latest paintings were both Christmas presents so I had to wait til their recipients got them before making them public, so here we go now:



My eighth gouache is supposedly a chipmunk. I still struggle with getting my paint to a good working consistency — straight from the tube it's too thick to spread easily, but it feels like when I add any water it instantly goes as thin as watercolour. There's a sweet spot in between that I keep missing.



My 43^rd acrylic is my house, as seen from across the street. You can't see much of the actual house frontage and porch from here, so it looks like mostly garage, but there is enough house back there to live in. Any other angle would be mostly tree, so if I wanted to get the whole building in, this was the best I could do.

Originally I wasn't gonna share this painting here:



Allow me to explain why I changed my mind.

I usually share my pencil doodles on my social media, often to let people see that I don't always have a finished idea in mind, or work to make something good for people to see. It's in the spirit of “this is what it looks like when I hack around”. But my paintings? Usually I only show those when I feel like I've come up with something that people might enjoy looking at.

This wasn't one of those. This was more of a gouache doodle [and an excuse to test-drive the new Pébéo gouache set I recently got]. I posted it as such, primarily to let people see that I often have no idea what I'm doing.

( Here's what was going through my mind while I did this. )

In my experience, paintings that move away from traditional realism aren't often met with much approval. But — to my surprise — I got a few vocal likes on this one, mostly saying that they really liked the colours. One lady said that if she had this, she would frame it and hang it up! So I got her address and gave it to her.

My point is that I have no idea what people are going to like, or not like. I'm tempted to give up trying to guess.

My sixth gouache is a portrait of Delvón Lamarr of the Delvón Lamarr Organ Trio. What struck me about the reference photo for this, was the way that the stage lights created a triad of secondary colours in the face — as opposed to the more standard triad of primaries. That aspect interested me [along with the dramatic back-lighting], so I tried to nudge the colours in the rest of the painting toward the secondaries, to help unify the piece. And I think that worked somewhat.

My fifth gouache is a tribute to musical and visual artist Gizelle Smith. The hair was particularly challenging — I don't think I nailed it spectacularly, but I also don't know that I am capable of doing it much better than this now, either.

My third gouache is another singer tribute — this time, to Alanna Quinn-Broadus, vocalist for the band Alanna Royale. I decided on a different approach for this one, because the lighting on my reference pic was very bright. This washed out much of the photo. so that there was very little in the way of forms being modelled by colour and shade. Instead, it was largely flat shapes defined by contour, with a few linear details. But I particularly liked the contours in that pic, which is why I chose it as my reference anyway. So I kept the painting small, forcing me to streamline those details, and emphasized the flat graphic-arts nature of gouache: converting the background to a flat black shape and stylizing the hair, in a manner which I admit makes it rather similar to my cartooning work.

Once again, I didn't manage to nail a photographic likeness, but I think as a graphic work in and of itself, it holds up not too bad.



UPDATE: I also posted this to my Instagram... and received a comment on it from Alanna herself:

OH. MY. GOD. i am BEYOND impressed and honored you would pick up a brush with my face in mind. i truly love this. may i share?

How swell is that?

While I was out tooling around yesterday, I had what I can only call a premonition -- almost like a little voice in me, saying, “If you go to HomeSense today, you will find gouache”. For those of you who don't know, HomeSense is a discount store that seems to deal in off brands, end of runs, and other odd things. Basically, what they stock is whatever they could find that day. You never know when a new item will show up, or another one will disappear. So you can't go there counting on finding anything.

But I decided to heed my inner voice, went there, and lo and behold but what did I find one lone example of?



Mont Marte is a halfway decent brand, so extra score.

Moreover than that [as one of my art profs used to say], I also found this:



Just the day before, I was reading about mixed bristle brushes. Watercolour brushes [and consequently gouache brushes, which are the same] are usually either natural (animal hairs) or synthetic (nylon fibers). Each has its own subtle strengths and weaknesses, and different people prefer different kinds. But I was reading about mixed brushes, where it said they offer a blend of the advantages of both. I thought that sounded interesting, and I was curious enough to want to try them out and see what I thought. But I didn't recall seeing them anywhere.

Until now. Yet another bonus score!