Have I shown one of my robot drawing here before? I think I have. I don’t know what it is with me and robots, but I like drawing them. I usually do them with a brush pen in a little sketch book I keep in my smallest bag. Gives me something very portable to work on no matter where I’m at. But then I did a robot in ArtRage on my desktop, using the watercolor tools, and that looked rather nice, so now, a month or two later, I’ve started doing another one, only this time actually painting it with real watercolors on real paper.

Imagine that. I haven’t painted with water colors since I was in college, say 20 or more years ago? And yet I have kept in my art supplies all this time a complete set of Cottman watercolors, unopened until this afternoon. Today was the day to finally open it. And here are the results so far…

What prompted this foray into traditional art was the kids’ desire to paint. I keep buying watercolor sets for them (you can see Pixie’s set in the picture there), and they go through them like crazy. They go through art paper even crazier than that, especially since most children’s art paper is NOT TOUGH ENOUGH to withstand the usual technique of over-saturation my girls use when they paint (i.e. they get the paper and everything else in the area sopping wet). So I finally broke down and bought some actual watercolor paper. I got cheap stuff, to be sure, since I know how fast it will go, but since we had the paper, and I had recently unearthed my paints, and then found my brushes, I thought, why not? And so I sat down with the girls today and started painting a robot in a tree.

I’m hoping we’ll do more painting this week. I already have a pretty good idea of what the rest of the painting should look like, but we’ll see how this goes. Again, I’ve been doing digital art for so long, I’ve almost forgotten how to do the traditional stuff. Ah well, the worst I can do is fuck this up and then have to start another one.