Hold back the dark

Good news! After much trial and error, I have finally found the squeegee of my dreams.

I know: why is a squeegee so important, right?

It's because I find I really love the sort of watercolor pouring look that creates broad swatches of color, and you need a tool that will spread the color evenly without scraping it off the canvas. It turns out that the correct tool to accomplish that is a speedball nitrile blade squeegee for fabric screen printing, because it has a round edge rather that a square or sharp one, so it smears rather than scrapes.

So this is my first little piece -- I enjoy the shapes and colors, but not the fine lines so much. I think it would have been better to make marks than to just trace the shapes, but I also needed to do that to see what the effect would be, so it's all good!

... and I've already started another piece on a larger canvas, inspired by a photo I posted a couple of days ago of a purple and yellow iris in my garden. Obviously this means I'm dancing perilously close to realism, but -- what the heck? It allows me to experiment more with my new squeegee, and I can see already it's going to be a delight to work with :).

... which is a good thing, because the world is not particularly delightful right now. And if our job is to bring light and joy back into the world, we have to -- as they say on the airplanes -- put the mask over our own faces first. And for me, self-care is all about creating and sharing beauty -- it just makes me feel like I'm doing something to hold back the dark...