At the end of my last post, I promised I would take the skills I learned in mixing watercolours and apply them to a larger painting. I also promised I may get distracted. I got distracted.

I got distracted with purpose though! I was in my car listening to my favourite Taylor Swift song “I Hate It Here” and she sang: I hate it here so I will go to / lunar valleys in my mind / when we find a better planet / only the gentle survived

I love that song and the imagery of a lunar valley with brilliant stars stood out really prominently in my mind. I wanted to paint it. So I found a tutorial for painting galaxies (here) and looked at some references shot from space to see what the horizon line looks like when you’re standing on the moon. What was interesting about this painting was that I had to trust the unique properties of watercolour paint to get the galaxy effect I wanted. Watercolour paint will flow wherever there is water. By covering my paper in water and then diagonally dropping a small amount of blue, purple and black paint I created a galaxy effect. This took a lot of tweaking but working while the page was still wet proved fairly forgiving. I just had to be careful I didn’t let too many colours mix, lest they become muddy. Once the galaxy was how I wanted it and fully dried I added the moon. This wasn’t very detailed and the shape doesn’t quite portray the size of the planet that I wanted. I wanted the planet to feel minuscule in comparison to the vastness of the distant galaxies, but I think the horizon is almost too curved which makes it feel like we are hovering in orbit around the planet. Finally, I finished this painting with another technique I had never tried before: using white acrylic paint. Small white details, like stars, would have been too difficult to do with watercolours. Using acrylic paint cut down the time and produced better results. Doing a mixture of large and small dots in clusters was almost meditative and I love how full the sky looks.

Honestly, though this painting of a galaxy didn’t turn out exactly as I had hoped, there is something very special about it to me. This is something that came to me from a song, a song I love. It’s something that I imagined in my car and placed down on paper. It’s by no means perfect but I am proud regardless.

After painting my galaxy I was itching to paint something else. I found this TikTok tutorial to paint a beach. I had actually done this one in a mini version a while back (see the Polaroids from my first inquiry post) but I decided to give it another shot since I have learned so much since then. There are parts I love more than my first attempt: the distant mountains seem more clear, the grass more full, and the water more real but ultimately I wasn’t as happy with the results of this one. The lesson I had to learn today was when to let the paint dry and when to take advantage of the wet. In this painting my impatience won out, again and again, making parts of the beach and grass muddier than I meant it to be. My use of the white acrylic paint didn’t make the situation any better as I failed to account for the curve incoming waves should have.

The last thing I painted that day was this little seaside town in the UK (reference found here). Can you see it? Yeah, it’s that small strip of three buildings in the reference image. This was fun to play with. I practiced letting the colours fully dry before adding in shading. I’d seen other painters use grey to shade, but I feel this just made the buildings look dirty. But the colours didn’t mix. I had let them dry adequately and avoided the muddy mistake I had made on the beach. Though I may have been too afraid of the colours mixing and robbed this painting of any vibrancy. Still. I like it. Painting the rocks below was a fun challenge and my ink pens ran out halfway through, forcing me to buy a nicer one from the bookstore (it’s a 05 Sakura Micron if you’re curious). I considered adding a fence above the rocks using acrylic paint, but honestly, I didn’t want to mess with it too much more.

And that’s about it for this week’s painting journey. I only have nine pages left of my watercolour book so I will have to buy a new one. This time I will be sure to get one with good quality pages. I also looked at getting proper watercolours but they are nearly $40 and I still don’t feel I am skilled enough to warrant that.