Join me as I make a small watercolor. I start with a drawing of geometric shapes, then I make a watercolor loosely inspired by a landscape. I’ll share my thought process and inspiration with you along the way. I hope you’ll enjoy this meditative process.
See a year’s worth of little watercolor squares I made here.
If you want to learn more about watercolor, I offer an online watercolor course, and you can find it here.
I did something I haven’t done in a while this week. I made a little watercolor square and shot a video of it, showing the process from start to finish. If you’ve been following my work for some time, you might be familiar with my project of making little watercolors every day for a year back in 2016. Making small watercolors has always been a meditative practice for me, so doing this felt like coming home. With all the craziness happening in the world, I felt like sharing this process as a little gift I could give others. I hope it brings you some peace.
If you want to learn more about watercolor, I offer an online watercolor course, and you can find it here.
For the last few months I’ve been experimenting with making watercolor maps of my runs, walks, and bike rides. I keep track of these activities using a GPS, upload the data to Strava (a sort of social network for athletes), and then use the Strava-generated map as the reference for these drawings.
When I started making these, I was including a lot of the data, but after a while I realized that the map part was the most interesting. So I’ve focused on making these smaller – more minimal – drawings since then.
Below you can see the drawings in their current incarnation (the six drawings on the top left) and in their previous forms. The current drawings are 5×7 inches and are watercolor, graphite, colored pencil, ink, and acrylic.
My family had planned to go backpacking last weekend, and I spent the week trying to figure out just the right spot for us: the right distance, difficulty, and weather conditions. A mellow option on Commissary Ridge and up to Mount Mitchell? A strenuous hike over six of the tallest mountains on the East Coast? Or The Seven Sisters, a tough hike near Montreat? By dinner time Friday night, with the predicted weekend weather in the mountains much colder than we’d expected, we decided to cancel our plans and go backpacking at another (warmer) time. Our son is only 11 years old, and while he enjoys backpacking, we want to keep it fun for him. Being out in the elements and cold all weekend didn’t sound like fun.
After all that anticipation though, I was mentally prepared to do something epic. A cycling friend proposed an 80-miler with a big climb on Saturday – perfect! So with some sun and temps in the 50’s and 60’s, a group of us headed out toward Stone Mountain and climbed Oklahoma, a nasty 3-mile long climb with an average grade of 6% and some super steep pitches toward the top. What’s special about this though is that I haven’t had the desire to put in big miles on the bike in a few years. It felt good to want to do that, and although I haven’t put in the on-bike training I would have preferred before a ride like this, I have been doing some long hikes this year. It turns out that the long miles on foot coupled with some short hard rides were enough to be able to complete the 80 miles and feel recovered enough to ride a relaxed 45 miles the next day.
I think what helped a lot was that after over two decades of riding my bike, I have finally learned how to properly fuel up for sustained energy. Marathon training and lots of hiking helped me by learning to rely on more real food rather than “performance” food (bars, gels, and the like).
Sunday was Mother’s Day, and we celebrated with a picnic in one of our favorite spots. We went for a walk afterward and spotted beavers! We stayed for a while spying on them and watching as they silently swam down the creek and made their way over and under fallen logs. They are surprisingly big! On the way out of the woods, I noticed some interesting shapes, textures, and colors around us, and planned to come back with my sketchbook. There seemed to be lots of possibilities for abstraction.
That evening while our son was playing with his Nerf gun, he shot a dart at one of my 6-foot tall paintings in the living room. I’m happy to say the painting survived.
The next day, sketchbook and watercolors in tow, I set up a little camp chair to make some drawings. I made a few thumbnail sketches and color studies, then watched ducks darting around and geese as they strolled with their little ones.
The 63 skies project is going well! I’m still not sure what to name it, but I’ve landed on how the paintings will look and feel. Here’s how it’s going:
This morning I repainted 3 of the first 4 paintings I’d made because they didn’t feel right. The last one to re-paint is on the lower right. You can see the initial stages of the work in this piece.
For those of you who are curious, here’s what the group of paintings looked like before I re-worked the first four:
I ended up painting them again because I found them over-worked and heavy feeling. Because there will be so many of these extending 19 feet up and 17 feet out, I think they’d feel oppressive on that scale, so instead I opted for a more loose and airy approach.
Happily I’ve already raised almost 50% of the cost of these materials so far! You can contribute to this project on my project page at Buy Me a Coffee. Thank you to all those who’ve already contributed! It means a lot that you believe in my work.
Thanks and have a good week!
I’m excited to announce that some of my botanical drawings have been licensed for use in a soon-to-be-published wildflower guide!
I got the news last week after a publisher found my drawings and contacted me about making some others for a new guide they are working on.
When the project is completed, I’ll share images and links to the finished guide here. In the meantime, you can find some of my original botanical drawings here, and if you’re looking for a gift for the writer in your life, my greeting cards are back in stock! These feature ten of my botanical watercolors of flowers, seeds and leaves found in North Carolina. Find the cards here.
Due to popular request I’m doing a print run of my Botanical Drawing Greeting Cards this spring!
Pre-order your cards here until Thursday April 15th.
This is a pack of 10 greeting cards with my botanical drawings on the front. Each card features a different plant and is ready to be personalized on the inside. They come with envelopes.
The plants featured are all found in North Carolina and according to a good friend, the cards are a perfect gift for a teacher, neighbor, friend, family, minister – particularly if they love nature.
Cards will ship in May and are only available direct from me.
See them all and get the details HERE.
This morning I went exploring in the neighborhood with my son. We walked through a stream and through bramble and over fallen trees and on a hillside of kudzu… we found animal tracks and bones and all sorts of adventurous stuff. We also found beautiful flowering weeds!
I always get excited in that transition from winter to spring, when the dandelion, violets, clover, and nettle and all sorts of tiny tender leaves and flowers start to appear. I picked one of my favorite (it was in a spot filled with many others), some purple dead nettle, so I could make a drawing.
I thought you might like to see the process and maybe even join along. So here we go back in the studio…
In case you do want to join me, I’m using pencil, Pigma micron ink pen, watercolor and a 140lb watercolor paper.
Want to learn how to use watercolors? Check out my watercolor course.
Hi everyone! Join me as I add watercolor to a botanical drawing. Here I’ll show you how to layer transparent watercolor in a loose relaxed way to add color to your drawings. This is the follow up to my Step-by-step botanical drawing video.
Share this freely!
If you are looking to dive deeper into watercolor, check out my new watercolor class HERE. It’s for all levels and features video lessons you can do at your own pace. See you in class!
Some cool things happening next week!
AUCTION ON WEDNESDAY
On Wednesday May 13th, I’ll be hosting an auction right from my studio!
You’ll need to be on the Insider’s List to join in on the fun so if you’re not already, email me to sign up by the end of this week because my email with all the info goes out Monday.
MINDFUL MONDAY WITH ELDER GALLERY
I’m pleased to share with you that Elder Gallery of Contemporary Art invited me to host an Instagram Live event on Monday May 11th. Here’s the post about the event on their Instagram.
Mindful Monday with Jessica Singerman
Monday, May 11, 2020 | 10 am
Join us and gallery artist Jessica Singerman for a special “Mindful Monday” on Instagram. In addition to guiding us through a hands-on art exercise, she’ll discuss her current “new normal” during the pandemic as an artist, a teacher and a mother, and tips for staying grounded during these uncertain times. A great mid-morning art break for anyone working, teaching or learning at home!
Monday, May 11, 2020 at 10 am
Instagram: @elder_gallery_clt | @jessicasingermanfineart
Based in Winston-Salem, NC and inspired by a deep passion for the outdoors, cycling and traveling, Jessica’s work was first featured at the gallery in the 2018 March Invitational. In the 2019 exhibition Beyond the Mountain, Jessica’s paintings surrounded her impressive Paper Mountain installation composed of 1,000 hand-folded origami cranes.
