Painting for real is hard!

I'm sure you know me well enough to know that I almost always draw digitally. Except for a few doodles, I rarely put my graphic tablet aside; I'm really not a traditional artist!

I much prefer having layers and an undo button rather than dealing with physical mediums.

However, this weekend I had the perfect opportunity to step outside my comfort zone, thanks to the opening of our art studio!

You see, my wife, our friend and I are renting this studio, and they're both planning to start hosting art workshops in the near future. To test the concept, they invited a bunch of friends over to learn acrylic painting. And of course, I joined the party :)

After an introduction and a crash course on mixing colors, I found myself facing a very big canvas, wondering how on earth I was going to fill it.

It was intimidating at first, I never painted anything that big before! So I decided to stick to something familiar from my Inktober project: a plant duck sitting among flowers.

After doing a quick sketch, I immediately ran into my first obstacle: covering the sketch with paint.

I wasn't using nearly enough paint, and yellow is often too transparent to cover what's underneath. I had to learn to mix it with white to get proper coverage. It took a lot of layers!

But there was a deeper mistake I was making, and my wife had to confiscate my paint water to make me realize it:

I was using paint to color in my drawing instead of just... actually painting!

I needed a whole mental shift to approach the medium differently and enjoy it properly. Like I said, I was very much outside my comfort zone :)

But I think it was worth it! Here's what I ended up with!

Not perfect by any stretch, but I'm really happy with it!

For comparison, back in November 2024 (almost 2 years ago already! We've been doing this for so long ), I made a smaller painting, also of a duck, by coincidence.

Back then, I was much less confident with paint. Basically, I was just trying to fill in the shapes as cleanly as possible, instead of building up the painting coat after coat.

Overall, that test workshop was an amazing exercise for me :) But I admit, I was happy to return to my digital layers and clean lines afterward hehe

Progress on my comic!

Very quick update! If you remember, last week I showed you the beginning of a silly comic I sketched in a day, and right now I'm cleaning everything up!

Sadly, I didn't have time to add dialogue to a new episode, but I've made a lot of progress on the inks. I'm about two-thirds of the way there!

I'm also preparing a better place for you to read the comic in order, without having to jump from email to email. But I'll tell you more about that next week!

In the meantime, here are some of the many emotions of the protagonist :)
It's crazy how inconsistently I draw her haha, but I'm having so much fun!

Please look forward to the full thing!

Final stretch of Inktober :)

There you go, the last update before the end of Inktober!

This week I fell quite behind schedule after missing a few days, but thankfully I'd prepared a lot of sketches in advance last week. So I just had to push through to catch up!

Now we have just a couple more days before officially wrapping up the challenge. I can't wait to look back on it together! And hopefully have the sticker sheet printed soon :)

Good morning friends!