“This Sweet Simple Existence” - September 2026 - A Year of Daily Painting
As part of my daily art project 2026, “This Sweet Simple Existence”, I am painting one painting a day for an entire year and at the end of every month I will be reflecting on my experience of that month’s daily painting experience.
September just flew by for me, what with he start of school and a return to a somewhat consistent routine. I painted with watercolors exclusively for the entire month. I used watercolor paper, 300gsm, cold pressed, and I taped off the edges so there is a clean ¼ inch border around each painting.
For the most part, the experience of painting with watercolors was more enjoyable than I expected. I am not a watercolor artist and I don’t usually whip out my watercolor set except for inconsistent sketchbook painting here and there over the years. Also, I’m so used to being heavy handed with my acrylics and oils that often it’s a challenge for me to be hold back from applying too much paint when it come to watercolors. With watercolors, water is really the star of the show, and should be allowed to do most of the work in terms of carrying the pigment around and creating light washes and lovely blooms. Having said that, I find watercolors one of the best mediums for loose, wet on wet technique of painting, as the use of water as a medium to carry minimal pigment allows for a flowy and dynamic style. Also, with watercolors, the most effective approach is to build up the values from light to dark and to always leave some of the white of the paper blank for the brightest highlights as there is no white watercolor pigment. However, I often forget to leave some of the paper blank for bright highlights and so I would always go in with gouache white or acrylic titanium white.
The paintings ranged from still life to landscape to a couple of abstract paintings. A strategy that I employed during this month was that when I found a subject matter to paint, I would paint different variations of it in a series. This saved me time and energy finding something to paint everyday. It also enabled me to create a few studies as a way to explore ideas and experiment with limited color palettes for future projects. For example, I painted a few watercolor studies of women swimmers in different positions of executing a stroke, which I plan to develop into a larger collection on canvas, exploring the form of women swimmers in the water.
Even though, I’ve observed a massive improvement in my skills generally over the course of this year long challenge, including in watercolors, I still feel that I need to work on being more light handed when it comes to watercolors and working with the paper rather than against it. An interesting thing I noticed was that even though I started off my paintings with a light wash using a big brush, the majority of the painting was undertaken with a small or medium brush (contrary to conventional advice of blocking in large areas with a large brush). The difference is that I would hold the brush in the middle so that there was still a wide range of movement in my arm and considerable distance between myself and the paper. This prevented me from getting bogged down with the details too early in the painting process before getting my values accurate. But all in all, the experience of painting with watercolors this month allowed me to recover from last month’s chaotic catch up of paintings and allowed me to explore different techniques from loose wet on wet painting, to a more blocky or gouache-like application to an illustration style.
All the paintings are available on my shop.
