“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, even as prints as some of them are unfinished 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.