“This Sweet Simple Existence”…Daily Art Project 2026 - May

I can’t believe another month of daily painting has gone by. After a hectic month of painting frantically in April, May has been much less stressful. I was painting primarily in my sketchbook with watercolors, wax pastels and some gouache. I tried to stick to the theme of still life and food art but I veered into portraits, everyday objects here and there.

I did the first few paintings in gouache, then when I ran out of yellow and especially white, I transitioned to wax pastels and watercolors. I think, because of the fact that I was painting in my sketchbook whish is always a safe space for me, I was a lot looser with my brushstrokes than I thought I would be. There was almost no overthinking. I worked off of reference images for some of the paintings, and I literally ignored everything except darks and lights. The proportions were almost an afterthought or just a very initial light sketch that I would almost certainly end up adjusting later. To that end, I spent much less time on each painting than usual, unless I was watching a movie and just kept faffing about the painting in order to extend my painting time.

Here are some things I’ve observed: First of all, whenever I was painting with watercolors or gouache, I painted much more loosely and my brushstrokes were almost spontaneous, to match the nature of the medium itself, especially, with watercolors where I allowed the medium to do what it does best…flow. Also with watercolors I was getting better at letting some of the white of the paper show through as the brightest highlights, which was always something I struggled with, since I tend to fill the paper with light washes. However, when I switched mediums to wax pastels, I immediately felt myself tightening up because wax pastel crayons are naturally more rigid than watercolors, and I’m holding the crayon like a pencil with my fingers way to close to the surface, as opposed to when I’m holding a brush where I’m holding it way up and further away from the surface of the paper or canvas. Also, wax pastels are not especially layerable and I would often forget to leave some areas bare for lighter colors.

But overall, there were some paintings that I am really proud of, for example the gouache portrait I did of Sterling K. Brown that I did while watching the tv show “Paradise”, the bird’s nest watercolor painting and most of the gouache still life food paintings. Also, I felt I wasn’t spending too much time looking for things to paint. If I couldn’t find anything from real life, I simply used a royalty-free reference image that I edited and adjusted enough to not look like the original. But for the most part, I had plenty of inspiration for things to paint from everyday life. Also the weather in May was relatively better than in April so a lot of my paintings were done outside on the balcony.

Finally, I feel like my May paintings told more of a story of my life during that month: whether it was the omelete and coffee breakfast that my daughter made me for Mother’s Day, a self portrait illustration of my first day swimming after almost a year out of the pool, Eid cookies that I bought from the bakery, the pigeon’s eggs and nest that I found on my balcony, a rainbow over the buildings across the street after spring showers, a drawing of my running shoes that I wore to go hiking or the blue moon (the second full moon of the month) that I saw from my window on the last day of May.

I will not be offering these paintings for sale in my shop as originals since they were all done on non-detachable sketchbook paper and the whole idea behind my daily paintings this month was that I really wanted to prioritize speed and looseness over perfection or a finished look. However, if there are paintings that people would like prints off, I can offer small 5×7” prints on a custom basis.