A big part of my journey back to creating art has been rediscovering watercolours. This was a medium I used to hate back in high school since it’s so hard to control – I was always inpatient and painting wet besides wet and then the colours would bleed together. Now I’ve grown to love the way the water shapes and forms the piece in a way that acrylic and gouache doesn’t.

These are all pages from my sketchbook – this sketchbook I bought before I started using watercolour so the paper isn’t ideal for wet medium and the pages tend to curl and warp. But it still gets the job done for now.

The majority of these sketchbook pages are local scenes – you can very clearly see how much inspiration I draw from living on the west coast, close to the ocean. But I did draw two little statues from Japan – this was a photo I took on my film camera and then the focus was all wrong so I decided to fix it in watercolour.

This quick moss on rocks sketch is part of an idea I’m working on for a larger piece. I’m still deciding on the size and medium but I’m sure there’ll be plenty more moss art coming up in my sketchbook and bigger paintings.

Trying out some pen sketches too, except all my art pens are dying and drying up. I think it’s time for me to buy some new art supplies.

Trying to play around with colours in my sketchbook. I’m really comfortable painting in a very true-to-life realist way and I want to push myself to experiment with different techniques, whether that’s using different shapes to suggest forms instead of having everything very precise, using blues and purples in shadows, or making things monochrome so other parts stand out.

There’s been a lot of farm animal recently too – I really lived the first little lamb sketch I did – I’ve been trying to use more negative space to create a final image – and then did the cow in a similar style. The last sheep was originally going to be more minimal and although I also used a lot of blank space I also used a lot of layers of paint. This is one of my favourites as well since it turned out just so cute.

One of my favourite new additions to my sketchbook. I love painting wood grain and adding mossy patches which this photo had both. I also loved the contrast in the glossiness of the water to the roughness of the wood house and adding the shadows in. I might redraw this one in a larger size once I buy more watercolour paper.