Learning to Paint Again

I've been a self proclaimed artist since I was a toddler, and I continued drawing through college. As the years have passed, life has gotten more full (in a good way). In 2018 alone, we've had a new baby and moved into our first home that Ryan built with his dad!

Image via Quotefancy

With my limited time, I've tried to find other ways to feed my creative side, but I always come back to drawing. Since drawing has fallen down the totem pole of my priorities, I've noticed that I'm getting more and more rusty... I don't want to lose those skills entirely, so I'm going to do my best to keep practicing when I can. Mason is getting more and more predictable, which means I'll have an hour or two to myself at night once the boys are all in bed. The past two nights, I've used that time to paint!

I prefer to paint on my computer, so this is a digital painting that I made using the Sketchable app for Windows. Since my time is limited and my confidence in my abilities has decreased tremendously, I'm going back to the basics and relearning how to observe accurate proportions and colors. For me, that means tracing. My very first art teacher taught me how to draw by tracing, and I know some artists consider it "cheating," but I think it's a good learning tool and I'll do it until my confidence returns!

I didn't want to worry about choosing colors with this first painting, so I cheated again and used the color picker tool to grab colors off of my reference photo (which I took myself... so is it really cheating?).

Here's how it turned out: