Friday Followup

 

Didja Miss Me?

Hey, so I know it's been a while, and I know I've been spectacularly bad at keeping up on my blog commitments, but... I have been a busy lil bee!

Last week I was waiting impatiently for my Arteza Watercolor Pencils to arrive from Amazon and while Amazon could shoot their founder into the upper atmosphere in an embarrassingly phallic rocket with no issues, they could not send my pencils in a timely fashion. It felt like it took forever. It didn't, and I've already whined about this ad nauseum, but there you go. While I waited, I plopped my paints into new containers from a discount store and stressed.

After they showed up, I started getting ready for a really cool trip to Boston with some friends, and that was a total blast! We ate a lot of food.

I took the pencils with me and... never really used them because we were busy as heck lol.

And yesterday, I couldn't post my art because I was dogsitting.

But here we are! And here are all of the pics & stories I wanted to tell you since last freaking week :P

THE REPOTTING SAGA

While testing my paints a while back I noticed that a lot of the paints were gummy or solid in the tube. They're watercolors, though, so I figured I could still use them if I found some way to reconstitute them inside the tube (I couldn't) or took them out of the tube and put them somewhere I could find them!

Enter: Cheap Dollar Store Containers

I bought three packs of cheap little containers for about a buck a pack, and each pack had 8 containers, so I had plenty to repot my tubes into tubs! Some were very liquid (one of the greens actually filled the bottom!) but especially the brown tones like Burnt Sienna and Raw Umber were totally solidified and unsqueezable.

My dad's utility knife with epoxy-gummed blade plus the gutted tubes of paint

Fortunately, once I had everything all untubed there wasn't too much of a mess - just a bunch of sharp metal tubes, some wrappers off of the sleeves of containers, the box the paints came in, and a few napkins!

And some paint splotches on my fingertips

Mostly of the runnier blues

Two days after the repotting experience, though, part 2 of the saga commenced:

THE WATERCOLOR PENCILS

Yay Pencils! In a box that made sense and was the right size!

My poor mail carrier must've thought I was going (more) crazy when he pulled up with the box - I actually did the "fist-pump for joy" thing you see in 80s movies. I was so excited I'd have hugged the poor guy if he hadn't high-tailed it back to his truck and rumbled down the street at top speed lol.

What a weird day that was! One mail truck pulled up across the street and delivered to my neighbor before leaving and then 40 minutes later, our mail showed up!

The Pretty Pretty Tin

I don't know why I was under the impression that the pencils would be coming in a cardboard sleeve when it says "comes in a tin" in like four places on the order, but I was very pleasantly surprised! The tin is heavy and sturdy and has a pleasant matte finish everywhere except the outline of the red box, the words "WATERCOLOR PENCILS" and the box around the word "EXPERT", which are shiny metal.

The tin itself is very difficult to open one-handed, which is very good, since it means it won't just randomly open if you're bringing it with you to sketch on the go, and the inside of the lid has swatches, numbers, names, and lightfastness rating of all 72 colors!

I'm planning to swatch each color by lightfastness rating, which ranges from + (Extremely Lightfast) to +++++ (Less Lightfast), though it does not say anywhere what those distinctions mean. By the Wikipedia page on Lightfastness, I'd guess they're using an ASTM rating system so + level pencils will hold color for over 100 years and +++++ pencils will hold theirs for only up to 2 years. Wild!

So. Many. Colors!!!

I haven't finished with my swatches yet, so my apologies for not including the whole gamut.

I packed the pencils for my trip to Boston, and here are some of the things I ate and where to find them (when I can remember where lol).

Go Go Curry! Medium Pork Katsu curry with a boiled egg and sausages
H-Mart food court

An amazing roast pork bun from a food court in an arts college
which was... an adventure!

12 Dollar Bento lunch at Karma in Westford, Mass
My lunch was:
A9 (Sweet & Sour Chicken), Miso Soup (not pictured), Chicken Fingers, Spicy Tuna Maki, White Rice
10/10 would recommend!

I was in the Boston Area from Sunday til Tuesday and I only drew a couple times while I was there because the adventure was non-stop! But now that I'm home here is:

THE ART:

"A Cool Pylon Seen on the Way to Boston, July 2021";
Watercolor Pencil & ink on watercolor paper; 2021

"Highest Colorfast Pencils 1"; watercolor pencil on watercolor paper; 2021

"Highest Colorfast Pencils 2"; Watercolor pencil on watercolor paper; 2021

"Undersea 1"; watercolor pencil on watercolor paper; 2021

And there you have it - a lot of the things I have been up to since I went radio silent!

All watercolor pencil pages were then gone-over with the water brushes, and I'm really looking forward to playing around even more with them! I still really want to go back over my old Pokemon teams and try to draw the trainers, so maybe that's what I'll do next?

I also really loved drawing that underwater scene! I used some references from WikiSpecies by hitting "Random Page" over and over until images of sea life appeared lol.

But that'll about do it for me tonight. If I find out were I got those awesome roast pork buns from I'll add it to a future post.

I hope you're all doing alright out there, and...

Go Enjoy Something!

FC