Bright Colors in Our Lives. July 31, 2024.

I have some absolutely amazingly bright people in my life; friends, family, patrons, cats, dogs, previous co-workers, local baristas, etc. From those amazing people I have been met with so much support and love as I left my day job to do my own business full-time. It has been a little scary doing the business on the side for the last few years, I was expecting people to tell me I was going to fail. It's really important that I give credit where it is due. I called so many people to talk about my decision and it has been so empowering to have people supporting this change. My dad retired shortly after (maybe an inspiration) and my mom said something I never expected: take some time to heal from the trauma of work. If you don't know what kind of work my day jobs have been in the last 15 years, I can assure you it was full of high stakes, high emotions, and high levels of empathy exertion.

I took my mom's advice and decided over the last month or so to just throw myself into the business and create! A huge, heartfelt thanks to everyone who has continued to support this hot mess (me) in making art and relieving me of guilt about this decision and encouraging me to just do the thing!

Almost on cue with these big changes, I found that Hubby, Chessie, and L conspired to give me an incredible birthday cake and this wonderful gift: a bespoke leather and wooden plein air painter's box. I put together some paints and took it for a test drive right away.

You can see a tiny adorable little palette for the paints there and some tubes of paint. I put this palette together thinking "yeah, looks good enough" and went out to paint. While I tested out these palettes, I realized that my skills in GREEN are poor. I'm from the high deserts of Oregon and Idaho, greens aren't throughout a landscape there as much as yellows and greys. I knew right then and there that I gotta learn how to do green better! I needed to look at my palette and make some changes.

To my horror, my colors were not great. The pinks/reds/browns? Practically the same colors! Too close to one another. The blues/yellows/greens? Someone call my grandmother to hop out of her grave, re-open her antique store, and sell a shag carpet duvet to The Twilight Zone. What was I thinking?!

One of the things I have absolutely neglected to do for... always ... is a proper color swatches and color wheel using watercolors. I would get a color, despite it's specific name and be like, "yeah, good enough" and plop it into my palette tray. It is not something I am proud of, but I am sharing a vulnerable and somewhat professional growth moment. As I started digging through my tackle box full of paints I found that I don't know a damn thing about paints. Thankfully, we live in the 21st century and someone on youtube came to my rescue.

I will spare you the details, but there are components that make up each tube of paint from different brands and they all are vastly different in pigment quality and ingredients. I started looking at the paints and just went wild with swatches and mixes.

I have four or five palettes that I sprayed with water and started to dig out of their respective slots to start fresh.

I am not dead on the inside the way capitalism and consumerism wants me to be, nothing was thrown out. Instead, I combined some of these "yucky" paints and mixed them together for my illustrations where colors are less fluid and more predictable.

With some heavy re-working, I decided that the plein air palette after changed was ready for a test run. I went to a lovely spot overlooking Lake Mendota and found a green boat with many other greens to challenge me.

I don't know if you can see it, but the love from my friends and loved ones combined with a clean palette. It all came together for me in this painting. I was HAVING FUN AGAIN and it's only the beginning. I still have a lot of work to do on myself, no lies there. I am eternally and deeply grateful to have incredible people in my life. I often have neglected those relationships and/or find it difficult to stay in touch when I am overwhelmed by a regular job (If that includes you, reader, I am so sorry!) Also, did I mention undiagnosed ADHD?! (I promise, that path will be explored soon, along with some physical health stuff I have been dealing with).

Many people put up with awful work environments because they have to. Economically depressed areas are even harder to deal with and near-impossible to leave those workplaces. I recognize I have some level of privilege to have this opportunity to do art full-time. We all have those half-used paint tubes full of rich color just waiting to burst out. It's never as easy as changing a color palette and trying new colors to make your story a little brighter--but it can't hurt.