Beginning of December Check-in
November has come and gone, and I can’t believe that we’re in the last month of the year.
What I’ve been working on:
I installed the commissioned painting I’ve been working on for a large portion of the year last week right before Thanksgiving, and the client was super happy with the finished product. They had the perfect place for it in their home, and I was so excited to install and see the painting in its forever home!
I’m taking a bit of a break from my paintings inspired by China. I need some time away from them before I look at the paintings again with fresh eyes. I think the 18”x24” painting is almost finished; I need to correct a few more details, which I’ll get back to probably next week.
I believe the painting inspired by one of my hikes from the trip to Joshua Tree I took with a group of friends is finished. This painting came together pretty quickly. There’s always a couple of details I feel like need to be adjusted in paintings, but eventually I reach a point where the desire to move on and work on other things is stronger than the desire to keep slightly adjusting a pretty complete painting.
Keeping in line with paintings inspired by trips to national parks with friends, I started working on my large painting (36”x48”) inspired by a hike in Olympic National Park. It’s a bit strange working on such a large scale after working on 8”x10” paintings. The painting inspired by Joshua Tree is 18”x24” so I guess it’s an intermediate step towards working on larger paintings again, but this Olympic painting is twice the size. Back in October, I worked on an 8”x10” version of the Olympic painting to help guide me in figuring out what were the compositionally important details, so I’ve been referring to that painting while working on this larger piece.
Something new that I just got into is soft pastels. One of the oil painters in my studio also works with soft pastels and I’ve been getting a lot of social media content about soft pastels recently, so I wanted to try something new. I’m creating with soft pastels with the intention of just having fun, and I’m not putting any pressure on myself to create something for shows or to sell. Sometimes I think that I make painting feel like work, so I wanted to do something creative without putting pressure or stress on myself.
Relatedly, since it’s nearing the end of the year, I’ll be taking inventory of what I’ve accomplished (I forgot the goals at the beginning of the year, which isn’t to say I haven’t been focused on certain goals, but I have to look back to see if the goals I made in the middle of the year aligned with the ones I set at the beginning of the year) and setting new goals for 2026. I have started thinking about my goals for next year and a few of them are going to be around creating more freely and having more fun with painting in general.
I think that’s all for now. I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving with friends and family!
