Side hustle

 In my last post I mentioned how I'd been following Dylan Sara's Daily Portrait Practice for more, well, watercolour portrait practice. For the month of April, Dylan had given himself a challenge to create looser, wet-in-wet sketches and that fit in well with my goals as well. 

This is where I started from. Don't get me wrong. I love a well thought out, deliberate, multi-day WC portrait session...something about seeing layer after layer building up over time. But sometimes? Sometimes I just wanna sit down and GO! Enter Dylan's DPP. 

I should add that I'm using a "mixed media sketch book" I purchased a couple of years ago from Tri-Art. Frankly? It sucks. Which is sad because every other thing I've purchased from them has been amazing. Buyer spoiler alert. And hence the reason it had sat on my shelf forever and a day. But I figured hey! I can fill it with WC portraits, which I'm doing but the paper is REALLY unforgiving. In case, you thought I didn't know. I know. I know!

 I also decided to use my "sitting on the sidelines" Fude de Mannen from Sailor (this one if you're interested) for the sketching portion. Problematic because its currently loaded with water-soluble ink but also instructional in that I'd have to be VERY careful with paint application. Speaking of paints, for the most part I use Beam Paints ... Canadian woman owned,  gorgeous pigments plus she's Carl Beam's daughter a WIN-WIN-WIN in my book!

Here's a few of the portraits:

Yesterday, for my final of this series I made the drawing using my mechanical pencil, the first in this sketchbook (and the last...ooof!). It was rough going given the grain of the paper and the sharpness of the pencil and it was NOT going well. Taking a page out of Dylan's practice I abandoned the drawing and went straight in with my paint brush. It's loose. It's raw. (I was using a 1/2" flat for everything) It's reaaaallllly imperfect and loose and initially was just gonna scrap the whole thing until I realized this, THIS is why I started this side-hustle practice. And because of that, I'm gonna shine my little light on it.

I look forward to continuing my watercolour daily portrait practice and filling this less than stellar sketchbook. Because ultimately it's about the process...NOT the result...that makes sense for me right now. Thanks for reading!