The small collection of tools that has accompanied more than 220 daily watercolor paintings: a Hahnemühle sketchbook, a Pentel Aquabrush, a handful of trusted pigments, and the simple supplies that earned their place through daily use.

One of the questions I am asked most often is surprisingly simple:

“What materials do you use?”

After more than 220 days of painting one watercolor every single day, I understand the curiosity.

Artists are endlessly fascinated by tools. We wonder whether a different sketchbook, a better brush, or a new color might unlock something we’ve been searching for. We compare papers, chase pigments, and convince ourselves that the next purchase may finally be the missing piece.

The funny thing is that this project has taught me the opposite lesson.

The longer I paint, the less I think about supplies.

That wasn’t true in the beginning.

At the start of this challenge, every decision felt important. Which paper? Which palette? Which brush? But a daily practice has a way of stripping things down to what actually works. After enough consecutive days, the romance of new materials gives way to the comfort of familiar ones.

The tools stop being the point.

They simply become companions.

These are the materials that have accompanied me through more than 220 paintings.

The Sketchbook

Every painting begins in a 14cm × 14cm Hahnemühle Watercolor Book made with 100% cotton cold-pressed paper.

Over time, the square format has changed the way I see.

I find myself noticing compositions in squares before I’ve even picked up a pencil. A doorway. A café table. A stretch of canal. A corner of a market. Somewhere along the way, the dimensions of the sketchbook became a way of framing the world.

After hundreds of paintings, I know exactly how the paper responds. I know how much water it can take, how long a wash will stay workable, and when a pigment will settle into the texture of the page.

That familiarity removes one more decision from the process.

The Brush

If there is a workhorse in my kit, it is the Pentel Aquabrush.

It isn’t the most luxurious brush I’ve ever owned.

It probably isn’t even the best.

But it may be the most useful.

The brush is simple, portable, and always ready. When your goal is to paint every day without exception, convenience becomes an artistic virtue.

I’ve learned that the best tool isn’t always the most impressive.

The best tool is often the one that makes it easiest to begin.

The Paints

My palette changes occasionally, but most of my colors come from four manufacturers:

• Sennelier

• Schmincke

• Daniel Smith

• Rublev

Early in the project, I paid attention to brands.

Now I pay attention to pigments.

I think about the blue that granulates beautifully across rough paper. The earth color that quietly appears in painting after painting. The green that never quite behaves the way I expect.

Over time, certain colors become familiar enough to feel like old friends.

You stop introducing yourself to them.

You simply work together.

Drawing and Line Work

Before the paint comes observation.

Most paintings begin with a light sketch using a Staedtler Mars B pencil sharpened with a KUM Automatic Long Point Sharpener.

For line work, I often use a gray 0.25 mm Pigma Micron archival pen.

I prefer gray to black.

Black demands attention.

Gray participates.

It gives structure without becoming the subject.

That preference has quietly influenced many of the choices in this kit. I want my materials to support the painting rather than compete with it.

Protecting the Whites

Watercolor rewards planning and punishes carelessness.

I use washi tape to create the white border that has become a recognizable feature of this project.

For small highlights and delicate details, I rely on a Pébéo masking fluid pen.

Once the painting is complete, a rubber cement pickup removes the masking fluid, and a Stabilo eraser cleans away any remaining pencil marks.

None of these tools are particularly glamorous.

None of them would make a dramatic YouTube thumbnail.

But every one of them solves a problem.

And daily practice has made me appreciate problem-solvers.

What I’ve Learned

When I began this project, I expected to learn about watercolor.

I expected to learn about color, composition, brushwork, and technique.

And I have.

What I didn’t expect was to learn so much about repetition.

Using the same tools day after day creates a different kind of knowledge.

You stop evaluating.

You stop comparing.

You stop wondering whether another brush or another sketchbook might somehow transform your work.

Instead, you learn the subtle behavior of the things already in your hands.

The materials become familiar enough to disappear.

And that is a gift.

Because once the tools fade into the background, your attention returns to the thing that mattered all along:

looking closely.

Looking carefully.

Looking longer.

Looking until an ordinary moment begins to reveal itself.

That, more than any brush or paint, has been the real lesson of this project.

A Note About the 365-Day Project

This essay grew out of my ongoing 365-day watercolor challenge: one painting every day for a year.

The tools listed above aren’t recommendations so much as a record, the ones that happened to be nearby when this started and earned their place by staying.

A daily practice has a way of simplifying things.

Materials that don’t fit quietly disappear.

The ones that remain become familiar companions.

Somewhere past Day 200, I stopped wondering whether I had the right sketchbook, brush, or paint.

That’s when the actual work started.

Not collecting tools.

Not comparing supplies.

Just showing up, paying attention, and making the next painting.

I’m curious: if you could keep only one item from your art kit, what would it be and why? Sometimes the tools we return to most often tell us more about our practice than the paintings themselves.

A few days ago, I completed Day 224 of my 365 Days of Travel Watercolors project, a simple street scene in Lagos, Portugal. White walls. A few windows. A roofline catching some light. Nothing particularly dramatic.

After finishing the painting, I happened to look back at an earlier watercolor from Lagos painted on Day 7 of the project.

That’s when I noticed something unexpected.

Without realizing it, I had painted the same street twice.

Not as a planned experiment. Not as a deliberate revisit. Just two paintings separated by 217 paintings that happened to focus on the same street from slightly different viewpoints.

What surprised me wasn’t the location.

It was what I chose to see.

The earlier painting is full of information. Buildings overlap one another. Roofs compete for attention. Every corner seems eager to describe itself. When I painted it, I was trying to capture everything I saw.

The newer painting does almost the opposite.

Most of the sheet is occupied by a pale wall.

The architecture has been reduced to a few openings, a roof edge, and some soft shadows.

A small touch of warm color in the sky does more work than half the details in the earlier painting.

Looking at them side by side, I realized something.

The biggest change wasn’t my drawing.

It wasn’t my color mixing.

It wasn’t my brushwork.

The biggest change was how I was seeing.

Day 7 was about recording a place.

Day 224 was about understanding what mattered in that place.

I don’t think I consciously decided to simplify. The simplification happened gradually, one painting at a time. Somewhere along the way I became more comfortable leaving things out.

A wall could become the subject.

A shadow could become the subject.

A small patch of light could become the subject.

The painting no longer needed to explain everything.

It only needed to explain enough.

That’s one of the unexpected gifts of a long-term project. Progress rarely arrives with an announcement. Most days feel ordinary. You paint, close the sketchbook, and move on.

Then one day you place two paintings of the same street side by side and realize you’ve been learning the whole time.

The funny thing is that I didn’t notice it while it was happening.

I was too busy painting Day 8.

Then Day 27.

Then Day 83.

Then Day 157.

Then Day 224.

Growth is often easiest to see in the rearview mirror.

Looking at these two paintings from Lagos, I don’t see one that is better and one that is worse.

I see a conversation taking place across 217 paintings.

One painter was trying to capture a street.

The other was trying to capture the light falling on that street.

And somewhere between Day 7 and Day 224, without realizing it, I learned that they are not quite the same thing.

One of the reasons I started this project was to see what would happen if I simply kept showing up every day.

I expected to produce a lot of paintings.

I didn’t expect the paintings to quietly teach me how to see.

I’m curious: have you ever looked back at your own work and discovered a change you didn’t notice while it was happening?

I am.

That’s the difference between us, and most days, it means I don’t get to.

We travel together, which means we travel at her pace as much as mine. A reasonable, sensible pace. The pace of two people trying to see a place, catch a train, and make an 8 p.m. dinner reservation.

Plein air painters sit for an hour watching shadows crawl across a building.

I’ve always wanted to be one of those people.

Instead, I take the photograph and keep walking.

For years, I assumed that photograph was a consolation prize. The closest I could get to the painting I didn’t have time to make.

I don’t think that anymore.

Somewhere around Day 150 of this project, working my way back through years of travel photos, I started noticing something about the images I’d actually kept.

Not every street.

Not every doorway.

Just the ones that had stopped me.

A wall in Lagos.

A chapel outside a vineyard.

Laundry catching light against a pink façade.

Each one marked a moment when I’d looked at something and thought, almost involuntarily:

I want to paint this.

Pienza, Italy. Looking at the finished painting, it’s easy to forget that it began as a photograph taken while I was already moving on to the next destination.

Looking back, I realize those photographs weren’t really records of where I’d been.

They were records of what caught my attention.

Out of entire days spent wandering, these were the moments that asked me to stop.

The photograph wasn’t a substitute for staying.

It was a promise that I would come back.

The original photograph. A note to my future self : "Come back to this one."

I just didn’t know, at the time, how long that would take.

Now I do.

Every morning I sit down at my desk, open one of those old photos, and finally do the thing I wanted to do in the street that day.

Slow down.

Actually look.

Figure out why this particular wall or window or stretch of coastline earned my attention when a hundred others didn’t.

The painting is the second visit I finally get to make.

It’s slower than the photograph, and stranger.

I notice things now that I never saw standing there with my wife thirty feet ahead of me, already moving toward the next thing.

Sometimes I notice a shadow.

A shape.

A color I barely registered.

A tiny detail that somehow mattered.

And sometimes, as I paint, I remember exactly why I stopped walking in the first place.

I still think, someday, I’d like to take her on a trip built entirely around this. An art retreat somewhere in France. Mornings with nowhere to be. Easels instead of itineraries.

I don’t know if she’d love it the way I would.

But I’d like to find out.

Until then, I have the photographs.

Thousands of them.

Most forgotten.

A few that keep pulling me back.

Each one a small, patient note to myself, written in a moment I couldn’t stay in:

Come back to this one. You’ll have time eventually.

One painting a day, for as long as it takes to answer all of them.

A Note About the 365 Day Project

This essay grew out of my ongoing 365-day watercolor challenge: one painting every day for a year.

Many of the paintings begin as old travel photographs.

Not souvenirs.

Notes to myself, written in moments I couldn’t stay in.

This painting is one of those notes, finally answered.

Lagos Algarve Portugal Hillside Street Watercolor

When I travel, I often remember streets.

Not famous streets. Not historic boulevards or places that appear on postcards.

Just ordinary streets that somehow make me stop.

This one in Lagos, Portugal, did.

The road slipped downhill between rows of whitewashed buildings, pulling my eye deeper into the neighborhood. Rooftops overlapped one another. Balconies appeared and disappeared. A yellow wall caught the light. Blue appeared unexpectedly between the buildings. Bougainvillea spilled over a balcony. Even a stop sign near the bend seemed to belong exactly where it was.

There was no single thing to look at.

The longer I looked, the more the street seemed to pull me forward.

Not literally, of course. But the road had a direction to it. The buildings guided my eye downhill, around the bend, and toward whatever might be waiting just beyond what I could see.

It felt like a street meant to be followed.

That became the challenge when I painted it.

A scene like this could easily turn into a collection of windows, doors, rooftops, railings, signs, and balconies. There are so many things to notice that it would be easy to try to include them all.

But that wasn’t really what I remembered.

I remembered the movement.

The way the buildings crowded together.

The way the road disappeared around the bend.

The little bursts of color scattered through all that white.

So I tried to paint the feeling of moving through the street rather than every detail of the street itself.

That’s one of the things I’m learning from watercolor.

Sometimes you don’t need to describe everything to make a place recognizable.

A few lines can suggest a building.

A wash of color can become a roof.

A small splash of pink can become an entire balcony of flowers.

And sometimes leaving something unfinished gives the viewer room to finish it themselves.

Lagos is famous for its coastline, and it’s easy to understand why. The cliffs, beaches, and water are spectacular.

But when I think back on the town, I suspect these are the kinds of places I’ll remember just as much.

A street I happened to walk down.

A view I wasn’t looking for.

A collection of ordinary buildings that, for a few minutes, became anything but ordinary.

Maybe that’s what I like most about traveling.

You can spend a day searching for the things you’re supposed to see and still find yourself stopping for something that wasn’t on the list.

For me, this was one of those places.

I took the photograph.

Then I kept walking.

Now, months later, I get to stop again.

This time, I get to stay a little longer.

Following the street.

Seeing where it leads.

View the finished watercolor on Pixels.

What kinds of places stay with you after a trip? Let me know in the comments.

When most people think of Lagos in Portugal’s Algarve, they picture dramatic cliffs, hidden coves, and impossibly blue water.

I stopped for a wall.

More accurately, I stopped for a collection of whitewashed walls, a pair of small windows, a lone flowerpot, and a handful of curious forms rising above a rooftop.

The Algarve sun had reduced everything to its essentials.

Large planes of white.

A strong diagonal slicing through the composition.

Small geometric openings punctuating the space.

Nothing flashy.

Nothing famous.

Just shapes.

At first, it was the architecture that caught my attention.

What kept me looking were the forms along the roofline.

Looking back at the photograph, I’m still not entirely sure what they were. Plants? Sculptures? A little of both? Whatever they were, they felt almost like quick drawings against the sky. Thin, irregular marks floating above all that clean geometry.

Without them, the scene might have felt static.

With them, it felt alive.

That contrast was what made me want to paint it.

The walls were orderly and deliberate.

Those forms above the roofline were neither.

Whether placed there by nature or by an artist, they introduced an element of surprise. They interrupted the architecture just enough to make the eye linger.

As I worked on the watercolor, I found myself paying less attention to detail and more attention to relationships.

The challenge was actually to leave things out.

Too much color, too much texture, too much information would have taken away from what had caught my eye in the first place.

The weathered surfaces told enough of the story.

The diagonal gave the composition its movement.

And those small shapes above the wall gave it its mystery.

One lesson that continues to emerge from this 365-day watercolor journey is that beauty rarely announces itself.

Sometimes it’s a dramatic coastline.

Sometimes it’s a hidden beach.

And sometimes it’s a white wall in Lagos, two small windows, and a handful of mysterious forms reaching into the Algarve sky.

Lagos offered plenty of postcard views.

This wasn’t one of them.

And that’s exactly why I painted it.

Click here to see painting.

Day 223 of 365 Days of Travel Watercolors

Lagos, Portugal

There are certain things I always notice when we travel.

Cafés. Doorways. Light on stone.

And laundry.

I don’t know exactly when that started, but somewhere along the way it became one of those details I can’t ignore. It appears unexpectedly, stretched between buildings, hanging from shuttered windows, crossing narrow streets as casually as if it has always belonged there. Every time I see it, I stop.

Because it feels honest.

In a place like San Gimignano, where nearly every stone seems to carry a story from another century, it’s easy to focus on the obvious things. The towers. The architecture. The remarkable sense of history that surrounds you at every turn.

But then there’s a line of laundry hanging quietly in the open air, and something changes.

The town stops feeling preserved.

It starts feeling lived in.

That’s what drew me to this scene.

The building itself has everything I love about Tuscany. Weathered stone. Warm light. Aging shutters that seem perfectly at home in their surroundings. Yet none of those elements became the true subject of the painting.

The laundry changed everything.

It introduced movement to an otherwise still composition. It softened the geometry of the architecture. Most importantly, it added a human presence without showing a single person.

Someone washed those clothes.

Someone hung them there.

Someone lives behind those walls.

And somehow that matters.

There is something unexpectedly poetic about a clothesline.

Fabric catching the afternoon light.

Subtle variations of white, cream, and shadow.

Edges shifting gently in the breeze.

Lines stretching across space, connecting one part of a building to another in a way that feels almost intentional.

It’s a simple thing.

But it isn’t insignificant.

As I worked on the painting, I became less interested in the architecture and more interested in the relationship between the two elements in front of me: the permanence of stone and the temporary nature of what hangs before it.

One has stood for centuries.

The other may be folded away before evening.

Yet in that moment, they belong together.

That balance is something I keep noticing as this 365-day watercolor journey continues.

The places we remember are not always defined by their most famous landmarks. Often they’re defined by small details that reveal everyday life. The details that remind us a place is more than a destination.

It’s a home.

A photograph might capture the towers of San Gimignano from a distance.

But standing in the street, what I remember is the laundry.

Because the towers tell the history of a place.

The clothesline tells you someone is still living there.

You can view the original watercolor inspired by this scene here:

Because the towers tell the history of a place.

The clothesline tells you someone is still living there.

Thank you for following along on this watercolor journey. Each painting continues to teach me that the most memorable discoveries are often hiding in the ordinary moments we almost walk past.

Laundry caught my eye first—white sheets pinned high against a faded pink wall, moving just enough in the breeze to prove someone lived up there, behind the shutters that stayed closed against the afternoon sun.
I stood looking at it, and somewhere in that time my attention slid past it, toward the arch beside it. Through the opening was another street entirely—a different building, another lamp, another line of wash hung out to dry, smaller and paler with distance.
The same scene, again, just further away.
Laundry above me.
Laundry beyond the arch.
One ordinary corner of the city opening onto another, exactly like it, as if Lisbon just kept repeating the same modest arrangement—wall, window, wire, wash—street after street, for as long as the city went on.
The wall itself had its own record of time. Cracks split the plaster in thin, uneven lines. The pink paint had gone patchy and pale in places, holding its color better in the shadows than in the sun. Wires crossed from building to building at odd angles, strung wherever they needed to go, with no apparent concern for how it looked from below.
None of it had been arranged for anyone passing through. The arch wasn’t marking anything—no plaque, no name, just a gap in the stone that happened to connect one street to the next.
But standing beneath it, that gap did something a doorway usually does: it made me want to know what was on the other side.
Another street.
Another window.
Another line of laundry, catching the same light I was standing in.
I didn’t walk through it.
I liked knowing it was there—one more version of the same city, waiting just past the frame, whether I went to see it or not.

Lisbon Laundry and Archway, Portugal Watercolor Painting by Aric Gitomer

Day 222 of 365 Days of Travel Watercolors

Lisbon, Portugal

Age 13

For most of my life, I thought I had left art behind.

I was wrong.

Not completely wrong. Art never disappeared entirely. It simply moved into the background, tucked beneath deadlines, projects, and a career that demanded a different kind of creativity. For decades, I wasn’t painting. I wasn’t carrying a sketchbook. I wasn’t standing in front of a blank sheet of paper wondering what to do next.

And yet, I never really stopped learning how to see.

When I was nine years old, I started taking art lessons.

A few years later, when I was thirteen, I painted the still life above.

Looking at it now, I see more enthusiasm than skill. The perspective wanders. The brushwork is uncertain in places. The objects sit a little awkwardly on the tabletop.

But I see something else, too.

Curiosity.

I wanted to understand what I was looking at.

That curiosity never really went away.

As I grew older, architecture became my creative path.

To most people, architecture and painting probably seem like different worlds. But the longer I practiced architecture, the more I realized they share the same foundation: observation.

Architecture teaches you to slow down and pay attention.

You learn to notice light entering a room. The rhythm of windows along a street. The way a building frames a view. The relationship between people and places.

You spend years looking.

Thousands of hours looking.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that the artist had never really left. He had simply found another way to ask questions about the world.

Then, at sixty-five, I made a commitment that felt both exciting and slightly ridiculous.

I would paint one watercolor every day for a year.

No expectations.

No guarantees.

Just a promise to show up.

What began as a challenge became something else.

A practice.

A way of paying attention.

A reason to slow down.

The paintings themselves matter, of course. But the greatest surprise has been what the project revealed.

Day 216: Carved by the Sea, Algarve, Portugal

I notice more now.

Not the landmarks.

Not the postcard views.

The things in between.

A weathered wall in Lisbon.

Laundry hanging from a window.

A narrow alley catching the last light of the day.

A sea cave carved into the Algarve cliffs.

The subjects are often ordinary.

The act of noticing them is not.

Somewhere around Day 221, I realized this project was never really about watercolor.

It was about returning to a part of myself that had been patiently waiting.

Not lost.

Not forgotten.

Waiting.

The years spent in architecture were not years away from art. They were years learning how to see.

The sketchbook simply arrived later.

Looking back now, the distance between the thirteen-year-old with a paintbrush and the person painting today feels much shorter than fifty-two years.

Both are fascinated by the same thing.

The beauty hidden in ordinary moments.

The possibility contained in careful observation.

The hope that if we slow down long enough, we might truly see what is right in front of us.

This 365-day watercolor journey is not a new beginning.

It’s the place where two lifelong journeys finally met.

There is a certain energy that comes with a beginning.

Not confidence. Not certainty.

Something closer to curiosity.

When I started what would become a 365-day watercolor challenge, I didn’t spend much time debating where to begin. The answer was obvious.

Lisbon.

The city’s iconic yellow trams have a way of appearing when you least expect them. One moment a narrow street feels quiet, almost still. The next, a tram rattles around a corner, filling the space with motion and sound before disappearing again.

I remember being struck by how naturally they belonged to the city.

The steep streets.

The worn tracks.

The faded buildings.

The trams seemed less like transportation and more like part of the landscape itself.

Looking back at this first painting now, what stands out isn’t the subject as much as the simplicity of it. A small watercolor. A quick impression of a passing moment. No plan beyond painting something that felt worth remembering.

At the time, I had no idea where the project would lead.

Italy, France, Portugal, England, and hundreds of paintings were still somewhere in the future.

All I had was Day 1.

The tram climbing the hill.

The excitement of beginning.

And the hope that tomorrow would bring another painting. <p>

View prints and products featuring

Lisbon Tram No. 579 – Morning Light in Alfama, Portugal

Day 1 of 365 Days of Travel Watercolors
Lisbon, Portugal · December 25, 2025

I wasn’t looking for this wall. It was just there, on a street whose name I don’t remember, between wherever I’d been and wherever I was headed next.
Paint had peeled off in patches, yellow giving way to bare gray stone underneath, the kind of wear that takes decades and no intention at all. The windows were set into heavy stone surrounds, evenly spaced, the kind of order that comes from someone building a façade properly a long time ago. A satellite dish hung crooked below one sill. Houseplants sat crowded on another. And strung between it all, laundry—a striped towel, dark leggings printed with something cartoonish, a teal shirt, a deep magenta blanket catching the sun harder than anything else on the wall.
None of it was arranged for me to look at.
That was the whole appeal.
What held my attention was the contrast between the wall and the laundry. The stonework kept its rhythm—window, gap, window, gap—steady no matter how much paint had given up and fallen away. The laundry didn’t care about any of that. It hung wherever the line let it, overlapping, crowding, one piece bigger than the space it had been given.
The building held its structure.
The people living in it filled the rest however it fit.
I spent longer looking at the wall than the laundry, in the end. The peeling paint told me more than the clothesline did—years of sun, years of salt air maybe, years of nobody getting around to fixing it because there was no reason to.
Everything felt used.
Everything felt necessary.
Nothing felt staged.
A window. A satellite dish. A towel drying in the sun.
Just another wall in Lisbon.
And somehow, worth remembering.

View prints and products featuring

Lisbon Laundry and Yellow Facade Portugal Watercolor Painting by Aric Gitomer

Day 221 of 365 Days of Travel Watercolors
Lisbon, Portugal

I ducked into the cave without thinking much about it — shade, mostly, a break from the sun. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust before I noticed what I’d actually walked into.
The opening ahead was smaller than the world outside it, and that was the whole trick of the place.
Sand and turquoise water and a run of sunlit cliffs, all of it held inside a rough arch of rock the color of rust and honey. I’d been looking at this coastline for days by then, always from above, always with the whole sweep of it laid out at once.
This was the opposite.
One doorway. One view, held still, as if the cave had decided what was worth showing me and cut everything else away.
The stone at my back was cool and pitted. My feet were still in the sand. Somewhere between the two, the air changed temperature, and I stood at that line for a while without moving.
It took longer than it should have to notice the obvious thing.
The opening I was standing in only existed because the sea had spent centuries taking the rock apart.
The same water sitting calm and blue beyond the frame had carved the frame itself, wave after wave, over an amount of time that made the cave feel permanent.
But it wasn’t.
I didn’t come out right away. From inside, the beach looked almost staged — too bright, too clean an edge where the water met the sand. I liked it better that way, unreal for a minute, before stepping back out into the wide, familiar version of the same coast.
And maybe that was what stayed with me.
The cave had not changed the landscape.
It had simply given me a different way to see it.

See the finished painting:

Algarve Sea Cave View Portugal Watercolor Painting
Day 220 of 365 Days of Travel Watercolors

Lisbon, Portugal

I’ve always been fascinated by laundry in Europe.
Wherever we travel, I find myself noticing it hanging from windows, stretching across narrow streets, or catching the afternoon light against old stone walls. There’s something wonderfully unpretentious about it. Laundry has a way of reminding you that behind every beautiful façade is a life being lived.
A building becomes a home.
A window becomes a story.
So when I spotted this scene in the small Tuscan village of Serre di Rapolano, I stopped immediately.
At first glance, it looked like exactly the sort of subject I’m always drawn to—a weathered stone building, a wooden window glowing in the afternoon sun, and textures that seemed to hold centuries of history. Much of the village still reflects its medieval origins, when fortified hill towns like this watched over the surrounding countryside. Those old walls have seen generations of ordinary life.
Then I noticed what was hanging beside the towel.
Sausages.
Several of them.
Drying peacefully from the very same line.
I laughed out loud.
Not because it seemed strange, but because it seemed completely natural.
That’s one of the things I love about Tuscany. Daily life doesn’t separate itself into neat categories. Beauty and practicality happily coexist. A clothesline is simply there to hold whatever needs hanging. If that happens to be a towel and a string of homemade sausages, so be it.
The longer I stood there, the more I realized why this belonged in a watercolor.
The bright towel immediately became the center of attention, glowing against the rough stone wall. Beside it, the dark curves of the sausages created a rhythm that balanced the composition almost perfectly. The warm wood of the window frame tied everything together.
It looked accidental.
But it felt complete.
That’s what drew me in.
As a painter, I’m rarely interested in copying every crack in a wall or every detail of a window. What interests me is the relationship between things.
Light against dark.
Soft against rough.
The temporary against the permanent.
The towel would probably be folded away before evening. The sausages eventually brought inside. But the stone window has quietly watched scenes like this unfold for centuries.
That’s what I wanted to paint.
Not the laundry.
Not the sausages.
The life.
Travel has taught me that the places I remember most aren’t always the famous ones. They’re the unexpected moments that quietly reveal how people actually live.
You can photograph churches.
You can photograph towers.
You can photograph historic piazzas.
But years from now, what I’ll probably remember most about Serre di Rapolano is a towel and a string of sausages sharing the same clothesline outside a centuries-old window.
Because the landmarks tell you where you are.
The ordinary moments tell you what it feels like to be there.

👉 See the finished painting and available prints:

Serre di Rapolano Laundry and Sausages – Tuscan Window Watercolor

Some buildings are meant to blend into their surroundings.
This wasn’t one of them.
Standing in Piazza della Cisterna, my eye kept returning to the same place: a massive stone tower rising above everything around it. No matter where I looked in the square, the tower seemed to find its way back into the composition.
Known as Torre del Diavolo—the Devil’s Tower—it is one of the many medieval towers that once defined the skyline of San Gimignano. Today the town is famous for those towers, but centuries ago they were symbols of something much more practical: wealth, power, and competition.
Families built towers not only for protection, but also to announce their wealth and status. In many ways, the towers were the medieval equivalent of a modern skyline. The higher the tower, the stronger the statement.
What fascinates me is how ordinary that competition must have seemed to the people living there at the time.
Imagine waking up each morning to see a neighboring family adding a few more feet to their tower.
Imagine measuring success in stone.
Centuries later, the rivalry is gone, but the towers remain.
One detail particularly caught my attention. Partway up the tower, a faint diagonal line cuts across the masonry. At first it seems insignificant, but look closely and it reveals something remarkable: the outline of a former roof that once connected to the structure. The adjacent building disappeared long ago, but its presence remains etched into the stone like a fossil. The tower isn’t just preserving its own history. It’s preserving the memory of a neighboring building that vanished centuries ago.
Standing in the piazza today, it’s easy to admire the architecture. What’s harder to appreciate is the sheer determination that produced it. Every block of stone had to be quarried, transported, lifted, and placed by hand. The tower’s height is impressive, but the effort behind it may be even more remarkable.
What struck me wasn’t the craftsmanship, impressive as it is. It was the confidence of the tower itself. More than eight centuries later, it still dominates the square without saying a word.
The surrounding buildings give Piazza della Cisterna its character.
The tower gives it its skyline.
The well may anchor the piazza to the ground.
The tower anchors it to the sky.
More than eight centuries after it was built, Torre del Diavolo still accomplishes exactly what its builders intended.
It refuses to be ignored.

👉 See the finished painting and available prints:

San Gimignano, Italy – Torre del Diavolo

Today marks Day 200 of my 365-day watercolor journey, and it seems fitting that the milestone arrives not with one of San Gimignano’s famous towers or sweeping Tuscan views, but with something far more ordinary.
A clothesline.
People travel here for medieval architecture, winding stone streets, and postcard panoramas. Yet some of my strongest memories come from the quiet moments between the landmarks.
Like laundry.
A row of shirts and sheets stretched between weathered stone buildings tells a story no guidebook ever could.
The walls have stood for centuries. The narrow lane below has carried generations of residents, merchants, and travelers. Against that timeless backdrop hangs the simplest reminder that this isn’t just a historic destination.
It’s home.
The laundry will disappear by afternoon.
The buildings will still be there.
That’s what fascinated me.
The temporary becomes the thing your eye can’t ignore. The fabric catches the light, softens the stone, adds movement where everything else feels permanent. For a brief moment, centuries-old architecture becomes less about history and more about the people who still live within it.
I’ve noticed something changing over these first 200 days.
When I began this project, I was drawn to famous places—the landmarks everyone recognizes. Somewhere along the way, my attention shifted.
Now it’s the quieter subjects that make me stop.
A doorway.
A shadow.
A tree.
A line of laundry.
Those ordinary moments often reveal far more about a place than its most celebrated monuments.
Reaching Day 200 feels a little like that.
What began as an ambitious goal has quietly become part of everyday life. One sketch became another. One watercolor led to the next. Any single day feels small, but together they begin to tell a much larger story.
Perhaps that’s why this scene feels like the right painting for today.
Not because it’s famous.
Because it’s alive.
Here’s to Day 200... and to wherever the next 165 paintings lead.

View the finished watercolor on Pixels:

Laundry Day in San Gimignano – Tuscany Watercolor Travel Sketch

One of the things I love most about San Gimignano is that it never feels completely separate from the countryside around it.
Many historic towns end abruptly. Buildings stop, roads continue, and the landscape begins.
San Gimignano feels different.
Here, the town seems to loosen its grip a little at a time.
I wandered beyond the busiest streets until the crowds disappeared and came upon this quiet corner. There were no famous towers, no postcard viewpoints, and nobody stopping to take photographs.
Just a weathered stone building overlooking a garden.
A trellis stretched across the greenery below. An umbrella pine rose beyond it, its broad canopy framing the hills in the distance. Between them were old walls, shrubs, and winding paths, each one easing the eye a little farther into the Tuscan countryside.
What I loved wasn’t any single element.
It was how naturally they belonged together.
Nothing announced where the town ended.
The stone walls became gardens.
The gardens became trees.
The trees became hills.
By the time my eyes reached the distant ridges, I had quietly left the town without ever noticing exactly where it happened.
The famous views of Tuscany are celebrated for their grandeur. This felt more intimate.
It was the sort of place where someone might step outside with a cup of coffee, water the garden, and pause for a moment before beginning the day.
Moments like that rarely appear in guidebooks.
They’re easy to walk past.
Yet they’re often the ones I remember most.
Perhaps it’s because they reveal something beyond the destination itself.
They remind me that San Gimignano isn’t simply surrounded by Tuscany.
It grows into it.

View the finished watercolor on Pixels:

San Gimignano Tuscany Garden View Watercolor Painting by Aric Gitomer

Some buildings seem determined to be noticed.
Others are content to let the landscape do the talking.
This little stone house near Pienza felt like the second kind.
Sitting alone among green fields and distant hills, it seemed less like something that had been built than something that had quietly settled into the countryside over generations. The weathered stone carried the same warm tones as the earth beneath it. The aging roof tiles echoed the colors of the fields beyond. Even from a distance, nothing about it felt separate from the landscape around it.
It wasn’t trying to stand out.
In fact, it would have been easy to ride right past.
Instead, I slowed down.
The house wasn’t remarkable because it was grand or beautifully restored. It was remarkable because it seemed completely comfortable being exactly what it was.
The door was closed.
One shutter remained partly open.
There were no signs inviting anyone inside and no clues about who had once relied on it.
Its history stayed behind the stone walls.
Its presence was enough.
As I stood there, I found myself looking less at the building and more at how naturally it belonged. The fields, the hills, the farmhouse, and the changing sky all felt like parts of the same quiet composition. Remove any one of them, and the scene wouldn’t have felt complete.
That’s something I’ve come to appreciate about Tuscany.
The landscape isn’t defined only by its famous towns or sweeping views.
It’s also shaped by places like this—small, weathered, and almost anonymous—that have spent generations becoming part of the land they occupy.
As I continued cycling toward Pienza, the little stone house gradually disappeared behind me.
Yet whenever I think about that ride, it still feels as though it’s there.
Quietly waiting.
Exactly where it belongs.

See the finished painting:

Stone Farmhouse Near Pienza Tuscany Watercolor Painting

Some travel memories stay with me because of what happened.

Others because of where I happened to be when nothing special was happening at all.

This small chapel at Quinta de Ventozelo belongs firmly in the second category.

We had stopped for lunch at Quinta de Ventozelo in Portugal’s Douro Valley, where the meal seemed inseparable from its surroundings. The vineyards stretched across the hillsides in every direction. Glasses of port reflected the changing light. Conversations lingered a little longer than usual.

Beyond it all stood this quiet white chapel.

Its blue door faced the valley. Cypress trees rose beside it. The terraced vineyards climbed the surrounding hills, their contours following the shape of the land just as they had for generations.

Nothing about the scene felt dramatic.

There was no grand viewpoint.

No famous landmark.

Nothing to announce that this was a place worth remembering.

Yet I found myself returning to it again and again with my eyes.

Perhaps it was the simplicity.

The white walls.

The warm roof tiles.

The dark cypress trees.

The blue door opening toward the vineyards.

Everything seemed exactly where it belonged.

The chapel didn’t dominate the landscape.

It belonged to it.

The same could be said for much of the Douro Valley. Everywhere we traveled, I noticed how naturally human activity blended into the terrain. The vineyards followed the contours of the hills. Roads curved where the land allowed them to. Buildings seemed to grow from the landscape rather than compete with it.

This little chapel felt like a quiet expression of that idea.

A small structure surrounded by vines, weather, seasons, and time.

As we finished lunch and prepared to leave, I took one last look toward the chapel and the valley beyond.

At that moment, it seemed to represent everything I had come to appreciate about the Douro.

Not just the wine.

Not just the scenery.

But the feeling that people and landscape had been working together here for a very long time.

Standing there, it felt as though they had been getting it right for generations.

See the finished painting:

Quinta de Ventozelo Douro Valley Chapel Watercolor Painting

Some landscapes feel as though they were built. Others feel as though they were discovered. This small inlet along Portugal’s Algarve coast belonged firmly in the second category.
At first, the cliffs were almost impossible to read. Walls of limestone rose straight from the water. Rock formations stood alone offshore. Hidden openings appeared and disappeared as the light shifted across the stone. The longer I looked, the less it felt like a coastline and the more it felt like a landscape still being shaped.
The cliffs seemed permanent. The sea suggested otherwise. Every arch, cave, and isolated pillar hinted at a process still unfolding. Nothing here felt finished.
The water found its way into the stone. Not all at once. Not dramatically. But patiently. Wave after wave. Year after year.
What fascinated me most was the contrast. The cliffs felt solid. The sea felt restless. Yet it was the restless one that slowly changed everything.
Standing above the inlet, I found myself tracing the edge where water met stone. The shapes were irregular. Unexpected. Almost impossible to predict. Nothing here looked planned. Nothing here looked designed.
Looking across the inlet, I realized I wasn’t seeing a finished landscape. I was watching time at work.

View the finished watercolor on Pixels:

Algarve Sea Caves and Coastal Cliffs Portugal Watercolor Painting by Aric Gitomer

Some landscapes reveal themselves all at once.
Others ask you to slow down.
This view of the Douro Valley belonged firmly in the second category.
At first, my attention went to the river.
It wound quietly through the valley, bending between the hills as though it had always known exactly where it was going.
Then the rest of the landscape began to emerge.
Terraced vineyards climbed the slopes.
Roads traced the contours of the hills.
Layer upon layer of ridges stretched into the distance beneath a sky of drifting clouds.
The longer I looked, the more there was to see.
A single vineyard could feel intimate.
A distant hillside almost unreachable.
Yet somehow they all belonged to the same landscape.
Following the river with my eyes, I began noticing details I had missed at first.
The curve of a hillside.
The shape of a distant ridge.
The way shadows settled into the folds of the terrain.
Nothing demanded attention.
Everything invited it.
Perhaps that is what stayed with me most.
The landscape wasn't trying to impress anyone.
It simply unfolded at its own pace.
The vineyards followed the hills.
The river followed the valley.
The roads followed the land.
Each seemed to find the easiest path, as though they had all been quietly agreeing with one another for centuries.
Standing there, I realized I wasn't just looking across the Douro.
I was following it.
And with every bend of the river, the valley revealed something I hadn't noticed before.
To the left.
To the right.
Near at hand.
Far in the distance.
The farther it wandered through the landscape, the more it seemed to connect everything around it.
And before I knew it, I wasn't following the river at all.
The river was leading me through the valley.

View the finished watercolor on Pixels:

Douro Valley River View Portugal Watercolor Painting by Aric Gitomer

Some views ask for a photograph.
Others ask for a painting.
This one simply asked me to stop.
I came across this scene sometime after leaving the road to Trequanda and continuing toward Montepulciano on our final day of cycling through Tuscany. The landscape unfolded in soft green layers beneath a sky that seemed almost too large for the hills below.
There wasn't much to see.
At least not in the way we usually describe memorable places.
No village crowned the horizon.
No landmark announced itself in the distance.
No winding road invited me forward.
There was only the landscape.
Long rolling hills. Patches of wildflowers. Changing light. And a single tree standing quietly in the middle of it all.
Yet I found myself lingering there longer than expected.
The countryside never seemed interested in impressing me.
It didn't need to.
Its beauty revealed itself gradually—in the curve of a hillside, the rhythm of cultivated fields, the shadow of a lone tree, and the way one ridge quietly disappeared behind another.
By then, the journey was nearly finished.
Montepulciano lay ahead.
The final miles had begun to replace anticipation with reflection.
I found myself thinking less about where we were going and more about everything we had already seen.
The villages.
The roads.
The farmhouses.
The hidden corners.
The landscapes that seemed to stretch endlessly beyond the next hill.
Looking back now, this view feels like the perfect farewell.
Not because it was the most spectacular.
But because it captured what Tuscany had been quietly teaching me all along:
Sometimes a place becomes unforgettable not because of what demands your attention, but because everything feels exactly where it belongs.
As we continued riding, the hills slowly disappeared behind us.
The feeling never did.

See the finished painting:

Lone Tree Near Montepulciano Tuscany Watercolor Painting