Delayed Happiness

After a long, long hiatus, I made it to the Como Zoo yesterday to sketch. I visited the flamingos and ducks, puffins, and big cats. My goal was to do some rough sketches and play with watercolor using good paper for a change (a soft cover Strathmore Mixed Media 500 pad to be exact). When I've played with watercolor here and there at home, it hasn't gone well. This is mostly because I am learning and have no idea what I am doing, but it doesn't help that I've been using cheap paper.  Yesterday was the day that I was finally going to use the "good" stuff.

Normally, I am in my happy place when I am at the zoo, but that was not the case. I felt anxious and I think it was because I was using "good" paper. It felt wrong to use it for warm up sketches. Plus, I never got around to playing with watercolor. I kept thinking that I should have bought some of the crappy paper to use, because it felt like I was wasting my "good' paper. All of this caused a massive uprising of the internal critic who resides in my head.

Today's conclusion is that good paper is no good if it does not get used. While I have a lot of practice paper, I think it's time to spend a week or two using the good stuff to get over the idea that any paper is precious.

Looking back at yesterday's sketches, they are decent practice sketches of items in life. The fact that birds and animals move, so that I could not finish any sketches, did not frustrate me as much as usual. Also, I like that I have practice drawings overlapping each other. For a very long time, it just felt wrong to overlap things. Now, I'm trying to be deliberate. Sometimes I overlap. Sometimes I don't. Most of the time, as Roz would say, I'm not out to make a pretty page. I'm trying to learn!

I am going to try and not step on my own happiness in the moment by getting obsessed about things that don't matter. (Smile). This is a good philosophy to apply all realms, not just drawing and painting.

On a separate, here is an outline of Dorian that I did several nights ago. To me, this one captures her face and body position quite well, except for the lines that denote her hip.