Secret Santa Paintings and Community Art Projects
Happy New Year! It’s been a minute since my last post, thanks to a refreshing break during December. Let’s catch up on some of the creative things I got up to in that time.
Artist Secret Santa Exchanges
Over winter I’ve taken part in two art community “secret santa” exchanges. One of them was during December, and the other is still ongoing in January. We started a little late on that one, so the deadline is more lenient!
The former exchange was organised by LanaGoesArt over on her Sun & Colors discord server. A group of us got together to secretly exchange watercolour paintings/illustrations/sketches with the theme of pet portraits. Each of us posted pictures of our pets, and then we randomly had a secret partner assigned to us. We could then pick from one of our partner’s pets without them knowing.
I was partnered with a community member that has a gorgeous (and goofy) grey cat, who I picked as my subject.
My watercolour illustration of a gorgeous grey cat, inked with a black ballpoint pen and white gelly roll pen.
Since the plan was to send the paintings to our partner, we all had the restriction of using paper around A6 in size. Something easy to post internationally.
I conveniently still had some Fluid100 hot pressed watercolour paper cut down to around that size, so I chose to paint on that. I ended up having a… love/hate relationship with the paper during the painting process though. Love the paper, but this batch is quite old now and I hadn’t used it in a while. I could tell the sizing was starting to turn bad based on how the paper was behaving with water and paint.
I am constantly reminded that actually using art supplies is usually for the best. Not using them out of fear or distraction is not, and usually leads to situations like this.
Regardless, I made it work and I’m happy with the result. So is the new owner!
Community Art Gifts
Something else I joined in on over winter were a few community art-gifting projects. These were different to the exchanges, and were instead focused on groups of artists making art for a community member going through tough times. I can share one of them I took part in, but others I can’t share (yet).
A few of us in the Sprouting Creatives EU community gathered together to support the artist anamardraak, by creating art of her original characters. Each of us picked one (or more) of her characters and then created illustrations of the character. One artist, hugoprintmaking, even created a lino print!
The character I picked was Oën, an elf conjurer. I’ll share more about the process of creating this illustration in the future.
My traditional ink and watercolour illustration of the elf conjurer character Oën.
All in all, it’s been quite a packed community-focused December/January period for me. Which was quite surprising, and different to previous years. I hope you’ve been able to find warmth and comfort in the winter months, or cool and relaxing moments in the summer of the southern hemisphere, during this time. If you would like to share what you’ve been up to creatively in the comments below, please do so! Talk to you again later.
