For the last year or so I have been a bit quiet on all my platforms. The reason being is that for last 12 years or so years I have mainly being painting birds. I have painted 1,600 plus paintings of which over 1,100 have been birds. As much as I love painting birds and they will always be my most favourite subject to paint, I had started to feel a bit unchallenged and also a bit burnt out.
So for the last year or so I have been struggling to figure out what I want to do. After a lot of soul searching, going down quite few rabbit holes and watching an awful lot of tutorials on digital illustration, creating patterns, vector art vs raster art etc, I have worked out that I always wanted to paint cute animal characters.
My biggest problem was when I first started to paint, I lacked the skill set to draw the animals how I wanted them to look so I got disheartened too quickly (plus I am a bit of a perfectionist so that didn’t help). So instead, I moved onto painting still life, landscape, seascape, dogs, lions, tigers etc and fell in love with painting birds. Looking back now I think it is because they are small, have so much character and are so colourful. The best thing about birds is that there are hundreds of different species so every bird painting could be different (I do have my favorites and the Superb Fairy Wren is probably my most favourite one of them all (I think I am at no 28 give or take) so out of 1,100 plus bird paintings, I have only ever painted one bird 28 or so times. Whereas a tiger is a tiger and doesn’t quite have some appeal to paint over and over again.
So where am I going with all this? The discovery of birds led me down a path that I really loved, and it honed my painting and drawing skills to where they are today.
I will continue to paint birds (I just painted one last week which I will post later on this week (hopefully) but moving forward I want to focus more on drawing and illustrating cute animal characters.
However, I have gotten wrapped up in watching tutorial after tutorial (to be honest I did need to watch some of them as I didn’t have a clue how to use Procreate and Affinity Designer) but it has gotten to a point that I keep thinking my little animals aren’t good enough (me the perfectionist that stopped me all those years ago drawing cute animals rearing its ugly head again).
Which has got me thinking - was I good when I first started painting - No - looking back at some of my earlier works is interesting (I first started blogging back in 2012). I bought so many art books and tutorials on how to paint but no one artists style really clicked with me - it was only after I started painting day after day and working things out for myself that I found what I liked and what worked for me. I didn’t worry that my art wasn’t as good as someone else (ok I didn’t have Instagram back then so I didn’t get caught up in looking at all the other amazing artist’s work and comparing my work to theirs), I just posted it and kept on painting, getting better and better.
Which leads me too now. I can continue to keep watching tutorials after tutorial, creating characters that never make the light of day or I can just start posting them and that is what I am going to do. I have posted a few already -only because I didn’t have anything else to post and I didn’t want a whole month to go by without posting at least one post) but I have quite a few more on my Ipad.so going forward I will be posting more of my digital work.
I also realized that when I honed in my painting skills, I was a painting a lot of ACEO’s paintings (they are miniature paintings measure 3.5 x 2.5 inches) (mainly birds and they are the reason by bird paintings jumped leaps and bounds in such short period of time The great thing about ACEO’s was they were small so didn’t take as long to paint and if I messed up it was just a bit paper and I hadn’t invested hours and hours into a painting.
So another little project I am going to undertake is I am going to create an illustration a day (well most days) for 100 days and these illustrations are just going to be rough sketching / illustration - the idea is that they will work like the ACEO’s did and they will hone my digital painting skills / style.
This will be an evolving journey as I work out a new path forward, but I am looking forward to sharing it with you.
Thanks for taking the time to read my very long post.
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