Sweetie Demo May 2023

Another sweetie watercolor demo! A little different on this one. Instead of talking while I was painting, I recorded a voice over after the fact. I was rewatching Mad Men and I just wanted to watch it while I painted. Sorry.

In this video I'm experimenting with two new(ish) mediums/products that I had never really tried before. One was Dr. Ph. Martin's Radient Concentrated watercolor ink. The other was gouche. I've used watercolor ink and gouache before. But never Dr. Ph. Martin's brand (which is supposed to be the Crème de la Crème of watercolor ink) And  only small amounts of gouache for accents and highlights or to add opacity to watercolors.

I also confess about how I tend to take things too seriously. And how I'm trying to chill out more and just play. Also how a dream I had helped inspire me to live that way. The legendary Loony Toons cartoonist, Chuck Jones (quoting his uncle), has also been helping me with that outlook.

"A dear uncle told me once, when I was deep in despair at some injustice by some bureaucrat, scholastic or familial, "Chuck, they can kill you, but they're not allowed to eat you." Exactly why this statement has since stood as the corner post of my determination to live my life as a life and not as an apology, only Ralph Waldo Emerson could have explained. and I hadn't read much Emerson when I was eleven." -Chuck Jones from Chuck Amuck: The Life and Times of an Animated Cartoonist 

In the same vein I'm inspired by this little excerpt of an Alan watts talk. Watts talks about how absurd it would be if the goal of music was getting to the end of the song. Or if the point of dancing was to pick a spot in the room that you were trying to get to. And how we trip ourselves up by mistaking destinations and end goals for purpose in our lives. Going through this grade to get to the next grade to go to college to go to work to hit this quota this quarter and this quota the next to retire and maybe then it will be alright. Life becomes a journey or a pilgrimage to some vague but wonderful destination. Maybe heaven after we die. Watts says

"but we miss the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing, and we were supposed to sing or to dance."

Materials I used/ recommend

• Dr ph martins Set A variety of colors from Dr. Ph. Martins. definitely kind of pricey, but they are very high quality watercolor inks. if you like the way the ink looks in my video and you know that you'd like to do watercolors with liquid watercolor you really can't go wrong by getting this set.
• Black This is the black I used. Like I said in the video, its really dark, and when you add water it turns into this really interesting gray purplish tone.
• Gouache set Not the colors I used but enough to get you started with gouache. I bought my colors individually. If you want the colors I used it was: Alizarin Crimson, Yellow Ochre, Flame Red, Ivory Black, Burnt Umber, Prussian Blue