I have been truly missing creating art. It is amazing how you can feel as if you are almost missing a part of your soul when you stop doing something that is so important you. I am going to change the project quite a lot though. Drawing is more difficult now. We have cats we rescued and this is often my view when I am trying to draw because Donut (his big brother is named Duncan) feels I should only be paying attention to him.
With the original project I had a lot of rules for myself. This time, it will be different. I will not be doing one small painting or drawing per day, I will be doing one or two, at most three paintings a month. Before I was keeping it to one adult animal species per piece, and no background. This time I may or may not do a background, but I am not limiting myself to one subject and I may decide to include a baby as well. I also have decided that I will throw in an occasional plant species. I will still only be doing endangered or extinct species. My biggest problem when I did it before was I could not spend enough time to make them as detailed or as nice as I wanted. Now, I will be able to put more effort into each piece and much more detail. I will still try to be accurate in my portrayal of any species I paint, but it is even less about being a scientific illustration but more about sharing art.
The first painting of the re-booted project is of the largest endangered animal out there. In fact, the largest animal ever, the blue whale. This is a watercolour, but not using the pencil watercolours like I did before. In fact this is pan watercolour that is by Culture Hustle. They are very supportive of artists, and their paints are animal cruelty free so that makes me happy. This is after one day of painting. It is still very light and I will be working on it much more. I think I will do less sharing about myself with this project too, even if it means the posts are incredibly short. I would like to include as much information about the species as I think I can without completely boring people because I love little bits of trivia about animals especially but also about plants. I may try to do some recording of my painting to show more progress.