In case you need to hear this...

Create for the joy of it……and let’s do some easy ‘doodling’…or - ‘messing about with paint’! Read on to find out how this affects your health in super beneficial ways!!

And yes, you have my permission to use this photo reference!

During my morning walks, I pass by this startling creature which towers over me. It’s CREEPY, but delightfully so. This person and their neighbor spend the whole month preceeding Halloween making a total scare-a-thon out of their front lawns to delight (?) and creep-out the kids on Halloween.

They’ve got him among stalks of corn, and there are stickly tree branch ends for arms reaching out towards you. Ugh! Wow!! (nervous giggle). I’ve got to draw this thing!!

There are times when we feel like everything we produce as painters has to be grand. It can be so overwhelming that there are times it can just shut us down. We retreat, so that we don’t ‘fail’. But what if we come to this with the idea that - “I’m just going to have fun!” The process itself is why we do this. When we allow ourselves this fun, and come in with an explorative and curious intent…that’s when we make some wonderful discoveries. We’re actually having FUN (yes, in capital letters FUN)!

First layers done and still wet. Done, but ‘not done’. It needs some more texture to become a bit ‘gnarly’ and interesting. Let’s experiment!

Using that creepy face as our starting point, let’s just do some experimenting for fun! After I start with a pencil drawing, I proceed with watercolor, using some various cool and warm yellows to a deeper orange in the darker areas of the orange skin. For the stem, I layer in some earth tones like Naples Yellow, raw sienna, burnt sienna, and quinacridone gold. For the deep shadow within the stem, I depend on my favorite mixture of Ultramarine blue and burnt sienna (playing with the amount of blue vs. brown to get the right amount of warmth to coolness).

For the surrounding darkness, I really wanted to experiment with Daniel Smith’s Lunar Black. It’s a color I don’t use very often, (so I haven’t given it a permanent space on my palette). It has some lovely granulating qualities, and I wanted to see ‘how dark’ and ‘how granulating’ I could get it. This kind of playing around helps me figure out what I want to explore next, whether that tool will help me make a certain project better, and more interesting. I laid it in wet-into-wet, using a milk-consistency. As I was doing this, I decided to drop in some Indigo as well to darken it further, especially underneath the pumpkin.

Let’s take this a little further and give our pumpkin-head some texture with other media!.

I decided that our poor pumpkin-head needed some texture - so let’s experiment with that. I gave some linear definition to the face, then added some stippling - all with a Pigma Micron pen in black. This was better, but it still needed more to reach that gnarly look of that neighborhood creeper! I brought out the Caran D’ache Neocolor II aquarelles. I had recently sprung for a larger set with a bigger range of colors that what I had at home already, so I could bring in some light pale pinks in the highlight areas and continue on with a range of yellows, oranges, and warm light reds. I scumbled the colors on, and smoothed them in some places with a wet brush. I did the same with the stem using some earth tones. Finally, I added several sparks of white with a white Posca pen.

Gallery worthy? Of course not. But was it fun? - oh yes! Did I learn a few things along the way? Of course! Every time we come back to our paper and paints…I gain some new insights.

By showing up to paint - yes, even if it’s ‘just for the joy of it’ we ward off our risk of ‘mild cognitive impairment’ in our old age….73% less! That’s significant! (I’m all for that)! Need to see that study? Check it out here! But seriously, did you REALLY need a reason to go have fun?

Looking for those aquarelles? Click here to find them.

Need a Posca Pen? Click here to find some.

Want a little more interaction? You can join my private Facebook group: Traveling LIght with Watercolor

See you around the pumpkin patch, and in the neighborhood!!