Dabbling

"Any activity done with love and presence is a spiritual practice."

This post is a brief foray away from my career/life update content into the art I've made recently.

Sketching the seascape in Maine on family vacation, Spring 2024

I have tried to make graduate school Not My Entire Personality these past two years. I'm getting back into the hobbies I enjoyed as a child: reading, drawing, playing outside. I asked for watercolor supplies for Christmas, but I was disappointed by how difficult it was and didn't immediately start practicing diligently.

I started actually making art again when I was home for Spring Break 2024.

                                    

This chickadee was done with the same colored pencils I did my art homework with in middle school. I was taking Ornithology at the time and thought I might get into nature journaling.

I went out to Douglas Falls while I was home and did some plein air sketching of my favorite hidden gem.

I tried a similar thing up at Maryland's Highest Point. I hiked up alone with a Girl Dinner lunch of mini cucumbers, Lindor chocolate truffles, Doritos, a sandwich cut into triangles. I was not as pleased with my drawing of Backbone Mountain-- the white spaces cheap colored pencils leave on textured paper have always pissed me off-- but I was content that I had done something creative.

My mom and I went to Swallow Falls together after going out for lunch. I didn't sketch this there, but I drew it from a picture when we got home. 

This is a Cheat Mountain Salamander (Plethodon nettingi) drawn from a photo. I had the same issue with the white spaces on the paper and vowed to switch mediums.

For Easter, Mom got me Watercolor in Nature, a tutorial book by a local WV artist, Rosalie Haizlett. I started working through it in order. The daisy was project one, during which I learned that you can't go back and add black ink over light watercolor without it looking... like that.

With this moth, I learned that I needed a smaller, finer brush to get good detailed texture.

I think the mushroom is my favorite. The crips white paper and the precise shadow reminds me of the art style in Curious George books.

I'm still struggling to mix colors that match the ones Rosalie uses. Greens and browns are particularly difficult, for some reason. I think I just don't have the same base colors she's using for mixing, but it gives my art a unique flair anyway. No one paints exactly the same thing as anyone else.

I'm halfway through her tutorials now, and I used up my entire first pad of watercolor paper.

This is a thank you card I made for my coworker, which was based on two separate photos: one of a butterfly posing on Echinacea, our study species, and one of the wing pattern of the Regal Fritillary butterfly she's been dying to see in real life.

I write poetry under a pseudonym. My poetry Instagram account saw a few new posts during grad school. My favorite was a play on the name of a man things didn't work out with, so it will never show it's face on the Internet.

And then junk journaling-- that will get its own post. Maybe multiple posts. It's how I've been saving pieces of my days to remind me of events when I don't have the mental energy to write them out. I spent many evenings catching up on junk journaling when I should have been writing my thesis.

The dream is to someday do more than dabble. I want art to have a more central place in my life.