After I’d been nature journaling for a while (I know – I keep mentioning it but have yet to show; please forgive me), I began playing with my style. First, I just found some basic youtube tutorials and made a donut and a bee. I can see from the photo that I was still using some decade’s old paint my brother gifted me from his stash a long while back.

The bee is shiny, as I had picked up a cheap metallic set on sale recently, though that’s hard to render in a phone photo, and I later added a little context along the edges. I sent these to my older niece and nephew.

I wanted to try more after that. I am in love with Jean Mackay‘s style, and had wondered if I could get out of my make-it-look-realistic rut and into a more artistic expression. It took a little effort to understand how to break curves into corners, but I was quite pleased with the results, I must say! Curiously, I didn’t explore this style after these postcards. Huh.

I think I found these birds at ABCbirds.org, but I may be wrong. These were painted sometime around last May, so it’s been too long unfortunately for me to recall precisely. It’s a little difficult to tell, but somewhere along the exploration of watercoloring, I came across speckling the page afterward (perhaps this was a trick from Jean), so I did that as well. I rather like the look.

I was driving in one of the nation’s crummiest commutes around this time as well (still do, sad fact!), and I thought about how I had turned the other cars into buffalo in my mind, and that helped not get so angry at the insanely dangerous and/or incredibly selfish drivers I occasionally come across (some buffalo have rabies…). From this idea, I realized that geese, who sometimes will attack people, are just that – geese. Of course their behavior is quite natural. And, are humans really all that different? “Geese gonna geese” is a phrase I picked up that just sort of helped me let go other people’s stupidity.