Scattered Thoughts . . .

O ver the past couple of weeks, I purchased some better art supplies.  The brushes I had weren't all that great, the paper was kind of lousy when using it for painting with watercolors, and I quickly realized that I could use a few different sizes of drawing boards. I had been doing my sketching and painting on a table which wasn't ideal.  Sometimes I kept the paper loose so I could turn it and angle it but then it seemed to buckle and warp more.  Other times I taped the paper down to the table which helped with the buckling and warping but I lost some control in positioning the paper just right.  There are advantages and disadvantages to each method but I decided to purchase a couple of pieces of acrylic to use as drawing boards. This way I can still mount loose sheets of paper for sketching or painting while still allowing full control over positioning and angling the paper as needed. I purchased two 16" x 20" pieces of 1/4" thick acrylic to use as drawing boar

I recently started getting back into sketching and that has been going well.  I've never really stopped sketching throughout my entire life so I wouldn't expect to have any problems with refining my sketching abilities again.  Painting, however, is something I haven't done much of in many decades.  Watercolor painting is actually something I've never been comfortable with even when I was an active artist in school as well as college.  In college, every art-related class I took was sketching, engineering drawing and architectural renderings in graphite only and then blueprinted.  Back then, we didn't have all large format color printers using today's printer technology.  We only had large format blueprinting available.  Consequently, it made no sense to render any original drawings/sketches in color. Lukey and Kenzie were staying with us for the long holiday weekend last weekend and they also did some sketching but I noticed that they were very reluctant to use t