B. Zedan

Delayed December Doings, the first: A card

Posted by bzedan on Jan 13, 2022

I've mentioned before that I spent a good bit of my younger life painting murals and landscapes. I love a landscape, it's part of why I love where I live, I can look every day to see a bit of dramatic vista that every day has a different air to it.

A cloud-shadowed mountain spreads across the background, low and bright clouds hovering just above it in a sharp blue sky. Most of the trees in the midground are picked out brightly with afternoon winter light in greens that belie the season made obvious in the fall-red and bare branches of other trees.

It's been a long while since I painted a landscape. It's been a long while since I painted ANYTHING really that was a painting-painting and not painting an object or painting digitally. I thought, "oh it would be nice to paint a landscape for this year's holiday card," and so I gave it a go. The craft paints I use, little dollar bottles, are old and make up a weird palette thanks to their slow accumulation over the years and the vagaries of what is available in local craft stores or hypermarkets. And I'm out of practice. I didn't like any of it, and it felt bad to do! To so fully fail.

Even trying to be gentle, like, "dear god, look at the colours you are using," and "it's been actual years," didn't lighten that. I did, finally, give it a go with watercolours and it went better. I'm no great weilder of them but all the colours were available and the result was more satisfying. I guess insert metaphor here about tools in one's toolkit and accepting that time changes what you need etc.

Three paintings in various stages of doneness are scattered out on a cutting mat, a watercolour set, brushes and other tools around them. The two bottom most paintings are the least finished and roughly done in acrylics on orange painted card stock. The top painting is still sketchy but more complete and done in watercolour. All are various views of the landscape described in the previous image.

With that at least proved to myself, I chucked all the half-dried paint and have resolved to get a better selection and also I need to go through my brushes because there are some in here I've had since high school and it's not kind to me or them to keep them in service. And then I thought of something fun and very easy for the holiday card and knocked it out quickly.

Chase has a nice printer and an excess of postcard-sized sheets, so that's what it is this year. Nor did I have time at that point to have them printed the way I normally do, honestly. But I like these! They are cute and simple and small and yes I'm including a download on Patreon as I have previous years (see Día de Los Reyes tag on Patreon for previous).

A hand holds a postcard against a dark background. The postcard is an illustration, with black outline and bold colours and overlaid patterns on simplified shapes, of a flock of parrots scream out "FELIZ Día de Los Reyes," with many many "FELIZ" word balloons filling the space around them. Three parrots are large and forefront, the rest are just heads peeking out of an orange tree

Winter here is trees laden with oranges and sudden bursts of parrots (though not the daily screm of other seasons, they've the whole of the San Gabriel Valley to terrorize and have some sort of annual migration within it), so it felt seasonally appropriate.

I've got posts for other things in the mail upcoming, December was quiet on the blogging front but moderately busy on the making. Thank you as always for your support!

Cross-posted with Patreon.

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