Payne’s Gray all over my best work blouse

When deciding to experiment with creating a WordPress blog, I’d originally intended for the content to be not only essays, but some images of my design work.

So far it’s been easier to jot down a few thoughts, go back to edit a bit, and post what I’ve written, than it is to sort out artwork/graphic design projects that might be appropriate for sharing in this public space and then PDF, scan or photograph such things to create a blog-ready image.

I’m still spending 40 hours a week as an in-house designer for a retail corporation. I build page layouts, do intensive Photoshop work, design web ads, and participate in other sorts of content creation. Often I’m quite proud of the results.

“Intellectual property”, however, is such a grey area. I would only consider posting samples of work to this blog if I’ve gotten approval to do so by the company I’d done the work for.

(Seeing my magazine ads printed in national publications every month is still satisfying, and I sometimes wonder: who are the other unsung artists behind all these pages of eye-catching advertising?)

There’ve been freelance projects over the past year that I could probably share here, since my clients are friends who it’d be easy to discuss usage rights with, but none of this is work that really shows my own artistic voice or range of skills.

So while thinking about all of this, I found the large community of fine arts professionals and hobbyists on Twitter, through searching the hashtag #DrawingAugust. As I discovered some excellent drawings, paintings, and etchings I began to feel the desire to get back into non-computer oriented work myself.

In September I started assembling the supplies for watercolor painting, and then dove enthusiastically into the world of actual paint, brushes and paper, with all the accompanying delight and frustration that I remembered from art school 20 years ago.

I also decided to document the whole process, to create a tutorial of my system for watercolor painting from concept to finished work.

Finding the time to pursue this has been more tricky than re-discovering the passion for it in the first place.

My long-term vision is to have images of paintings to post, as well as the tutorial article to share here and/or on Twitter, maybe even YouTube content…

Pixels are never this messy.