Recently I read the book Finding A Likeness: How I Got Somewhat Better at Art by Nicholson Baker, and if you are looking for a pleasant summer read that has more pictures than text, I highly recommend this book. (That said, I do wish the book designer hadn’t chosen to print the text in white on a dark gray background, which made the reading a little bit more challenging on my eyes.) This book has a personal essay format in which the author chronicles his experiences trying to improve on his visual art skills in a few different mediums.

The book inspired me to step out of my own comfort zone and do some painting of my own. One thing I found interesting was that by the end of the book the author had acquired an iPad and was starting to dabble in Procreate, and for me who creates almost all of my artwork in the Procreate app on my iPad and was now venturing out to play with actual physical mediums, it was a bit of a reverse of my own experiences. So, I ordered some new art supplies, and while I was waiting for them to arrive I challenged myself to do a realistic colored pencil drawing. I attempted to work from a photo I took back in June of one of the chickens at my sister’s house.

Photographer me, failed to account for the fact that future me would want to try to draw this chicken and thus took a photo that cropped out half of the bird. I attempted to sketch in the missing part of the chicken to the best of my (limited) ability. I also noticed after I was pretty far along in my colored pencil drawing that what I had first assumed was the chicken’s second foot was in fact just a shadow. So, anatomically my drawing was far from accurate. I had added the highlights before trying to do the darker feathers mistakenly scribbling right over the highlights. Then I tried to correct this with first a white gel pen (that ended up being dried out) and then some white acrylic paint that I tried to color over. In the end, I wasn’t especially happy with my chicken drawing:

The reason I had acrylic paint to attempt that ill-advised fix on my chicken drawing was because I’ve worked with acrylic before, and am somewhat comfortable with it. For my painting project I wanted to try something new. I’m intimidated by oil paint and to a lesser extent watercolors, but I thought gouache might be an intermediate step in the watercolor direction so ordered a set of gouache paints for myself.

My initial thoughts on gouache is that in a barely moistened state it behaves almost exactly like acrylics, but if you add enough water it acts more like watercolor paint. So, it’s fun to play around with. I’m still getting the hang of how to layer the paint to get the desired result.

Some years ago I took this photo of a praying mantis outside my front door:

So, I decided to use him as a model for trying out my new gouache paints. Once again I took some liberties with his anatomy, and definitely didn’t try to create a super detailed illustration:

Best of all, I had fun playing with my new paint, and look forward to having more fun doing some dabbling. I did also purchase some watercolor paint when I picked up my gouache set so perhaps one of these days I will conquer my watercolor fears!

— Alissa

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Congratulations to the T-Shirt Winner!

Wow! I was blown away by how many of you entered my little t-shirt giveaway last week. Alas, I could only pick one winner. Congratulations to Debbie whose state bird t-shirt is on the way!

I promise to try to do more giveaways in the future!

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Weekly Inspiration

What I’m Reading: My Volcano by John Elizabeth Stintzi

What I’m Watching: Beverly Hills Cop I

What I’m Listening to: “Axel F” – Harold Faltermeyer

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Find out more about my books at alissagrosso.com

Find out more about my digital art at alissacarin.com

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My apologies for the typos and such this post is almost certainly riddled with.