I am new to watercolor as of December 2023, but it has quickly become a new obsession. Not only is it fun, I have found it a great way to combat anxiety. And bonus: set up and clean up are quicker with watercolor than other painting, too. So if I have only 20 minutes or so, I can paint in that short of time and come back to it later (in fact, so much of watercolor is layering that it actually helps to wait).
Here are a few pictures of my playtime:
I am so excited to announce the publication of my first coloring book! As you probably already know, I love to make coloring pages as a restful hobby. It began for me in early 2020, during the first lockdown days of the pandemic. I realized that making art felt too overwhelming, but I still needed a creative outlet. That’s when I first posted this hedgehog coloring page. Something about the simple black lines felt soothing to me, so I kept going. I was soon putting coloring pages like this one in our church’s Easter book and doing customized pages like this one.
Since then, every month, I’ve posted a few more, including some activity pages. Finally, earlier this year, I took a class on how to publish your own coloring book. In my excitement, I was tempted to rush its completion, but I tried to take my time so I could be proud of every page, and especially the cover.
If you do color any of the pages (either by purchasing a copy here or by downloading some of the sample pages I’ve posted), please share your versions with me. One of my surprising joys in creating these coloring pages is seeing how other people use color to make them unique and beautiful.
I’ve been enjoying designing these large floral abstracts! Not only are they so fun, but I find them quite challenging because there really are no rules or right answers. I have to just decide what I think looks good, and I could be totally wrong. They also work well on POD sites like my Society6 shop! See below for the latest three I have done, and some examples of them on some items.
I could only get two four out of seven of the latest “Fun with Faces” drawing challenged that I joined, hosted by Charly Clements. But I do love the ones I got done! Feel free to guess what the 3-word prompts were for each one!
I never understood the point of a word(s) of the year until I started thinking of it like a lens. Like if I could put on my “grateful glasses” in order to see the world that way. It’s like a way of training your mind.
I also don’t think you need a new year to start putting on different lenses! Start anytime! And here are a few words to give you some ideas. Feel free to save any of these to use as a reminder for yourself.
Do you choose a word for each year?
This month I entered a festive drawing challenge and here are a few of the pieces!
Every year, I wish that I had signed up to do some Christmas craft shows. I feel like I come alive around Christmas, because I can do craft after craft, gift after gift. But even though I never participate in any craft shows, I use my love of crafts and gifting for friends, family, my amazing Children’s Ministry volunteers, and the kids at church. If you follow me on Instagram, you’ll see some of them pop up in my stories, and sometimes I give mini tutorials.
All this to get to my point: Although I do not have any crafts for sale (I still take occasional crochet orders), I do have a shop on Society6 where you’ll find a lot of my artwork, including the Christmas ones pictured below. But I love browsing all the other artwork on Society6 as well, and you can get a huge variety of products! So take a look and support an artist this holiday season (it doesn’t have to be me!).
This past month, I participated in a drawing challenge for each of October’s 31 days. Every day, we were given a three prompts and had to reflect them in our drawing/illustration. This was a challenge for me, but I’m so proud of myself for finishing every day!
Here are some of my favorites.
I wrote a few weeks (maybe months?) ago about an art journaling class I am taking hosted by my friend, Farrell. In the process of taking this class, three words began to emerge as powerful and meaningful to me: beauty, freedom, and abundance. I’ve noticed how somehow those three words are showing up in every art journal page, so I decided to do a blog series featuring some of my pages, and just explaining my thought process of each.
This page’s assignment was to create a pumpkin, perfect for this time of year. I wanted to paint a teal, knobbly pumpkin with lots of texture. I used a stencil of grapes to make the texture you see all over the pumpkin.
Grapes have become a symbol of abundance for me. And harvest time really is a time of abundance, isn’t it? The harvest is coming in before the winter and all of a sudden it’s easy to see the abundance of food and life. But all too soon, winter sets in and our mindset of scarcity is back. In fact, I would say that most of our lives are lived out of scarcity. Sometimes I wonder if we actually prefer to live in scarcity: there’s always not enough time, not enough money, not enough space, not enough love.
But seeing the world with eyes of abundance is worth fighting for, and I believe it’s what God wants for us! I highly recommend this video by the Bible Project on Generosity. This is exactly what the video talks about: that scarcity is a mindset, and Jesus calls us to live differently.
In this pumpkin I wrote “a harvest of abundance” in the corner, because not only does a harvest imply abundance, but I also want to harvest a mindset of abundance in my life. It takes work; it takes a shift of my thoughts. But I know it’s worth it.
A picture of my daughter, done in a slightly different style than I usually do. But I like how it turned out!
This drawing is for the Luca challenge on Instagram! It’s me as part human, part sea monster!
These three girls remind me of paper dolls, so look for them in my activity pages soon! It was just fun practicing different eye types, hair styles, and dresses.
I have not been posting much because I have completely lost control of my summer schedule. You know how in the beginning of summer you put together a “Summer Bucket List” and a daily schedule and you have such high hopes because this summer is going to be different? Well it’s only July 9 and I have given up on the daily schedule or getting any of my own work done!
But just because I haven’t been posting or illustrating (either for my upcoming book or for Instagram), doesn’t mean I haven’t been art-ing. First of all, I have been taking an art journaling course with my friend Farrell called “Take Heart”. I highly recommend this course! It has been so fun to just completely let loose and be free of expectations in my art! And it is geared towards anyone - you do not have to have any prior artistic knowledge (or be local, as the lessons are on YouTube and the meetings are over Zoom).
I’ve also been playing around with different digital art, as seen in the gallery below. I love to support other artists and one of them creates beautiful brushes for Procreate (the app I use for most of my illustrations). Her brushes are the ones I used for these, and I just love how they turned out. I will be adding all of these to my shop on Society6.
So that’s my summer so far! What about you? Have you lost control of your summer, too?
A few weeks ago, I introduced you to my newest character: a fairy named Lucy. While I’m not ready to show you any of my actual finished illustrations of her yet, I thought it might be interesting to see some of the sketches that got me to my final product. Do you have a favorite?
I have been practicing illustrations that I think would be more appealing to children, so they mostly include animals doing human things. Here are my first two, and I’m taking suggestions for other animals and/or activities you’d like to see them doing!
Friends, I am so excited to say that I am close to being done with my next children’s book! But I am also very nervous, because that means I actually have to start sending it out for other people to read, and even worse… critique. In the next couple weeks, I will share a few sketches and maybe even some complete illustrations that I will be submitting along with the manuscript. So keep checking back here!
For now I’ll say this: the story is about a fairy named Lucy. I’ve gone back and forth with the idea of a fairy as my main character. Have fairies been overdone? Is this too much like Tinkerbell? But there is just something so appealing to me about fairies, and this character in particular being a fairy, that I just couldn’t have her be anything else. I hope that when you read the book, you’ll agree with me that she couldn’t have been anything else.
And now I will leave you with a few scenes that I have illustrated, mostly for practice in drawing full-page spreads. Thank you for joining me on this journey!
I self-published my first book, Amy’s New Puppy, in 2015 and just scribbled together some illustrations. I decided to update a few of the illustrations to see how different they would be if I published the book now and below are the results. If you’d like to see process videos of the updated illustrations, I saved them to my highlights on my Instagram account.
These are some of my recent illustrations. I am playing around with movement and body shapes. And of course pink hair.
I found it interesting while drawing these that my adult women have small heads and big legs, but in order to draw children, you do the opposite!
From now on, I think we should greet each other every morning with how Gabriel greeted Mary in Luke 1:28 (The Message):
Good morning!
You're beautiful with God's beauty,
Beautiful inside and out!
God be with you.
