Happy New Year! | SHW #21

Happy New Year to you!

I’ve been away for a couple of weeks as I wanted to take some time off to rest, recharge, and spend time with friends and family. It was a very restful few weeks, and I’ve been itching to get back into drawing and sharing art with you!

Starting to draw again

This week when I sat down to create, I had a bit of the blank canvas anxiety. This is pretty common when I’ve stepped away from the habit of drawing for a while. Sometimes it takes a while for me to get back into the flow, but thankfully it didn’t take me too long this time. I started my days with some low pressure sketching which made working on finished illustrations a lot easier.

Here’s a drawing that I worked on and completed. It’s just a basic, comfort zone doodle which also helped release some of the pressure of drawing again.

This took me a little longer to complete than normal. If you’ve been keeping up with these newsletters, you’ll know that I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with color. I tend to really like the line art of my drawings and then struggle with the painting process. I feel that the colors can often take away from the drawing itself. So I painted this entire thing and then decided to scrap it and repaint it using a watercolor brush.

I really enjoyed the process of using this brush. The strokes aren’t as easy to adjust once they’re down on the canvas. I thought this would frustrate me, but it actually made the process faster and more fun because I found myself being looser with each brush stroke and letting whatever came out be okay. The rendering is messier than in my past drawings, but I think it gives it a little more life and interest as well!

Re-starting my YouTube channel

I also created a video showing the time-lapse process of this piece and published it on my YouTube channel! You can watch it below, and subscribe to my channel if you want to watch some art videos.

I started making a few YouTube videos quite a while ago, but got a bit overwhelmed with the process and gave up on it. I really love YouTube though. It’s one of my favorite platforms to use myself, so I’ve been wanting to get back into making videos. I just need to find a style of video that’s fun and easy for me to create.

Right now, I’m planning to make some basic, chill drawing process videos while I feel into the whole video creation process and get acclimated to video editing. At some point, I want to branch out a bit more and maybe even show my face at some point 😬 But for now, I’m just going to take it slow!

Re-opening my shop

I’ve also re-opened my shop and am taking orders again! Currently, I just have copies of my book available, but in the next few weeks, I’m planning to add some prints as well. I just bought a new printer this week that should be able to produce high quality prints. Once I have it all set up and get the settings just right, I’ll update my shop with some new products.

If you want to be notified of when I add new products to my shop, be sure to subscribe to this newsletter if you aren’t already!

That’s all I have for you this week. I hope you’re having an amazing new year and being kind to yourself as you’re coming back from the holidays. I know we all tend to feel this rush to be super productive and work towards all our goals, but building compassionate, sustainable habits is what will truly get us there 💜

Talk to you next week!

-Rachel