Last month, I wrote a short article called “A Self-Teaching Watercolor Bootcamp Method For Accelerating Your Growth.” This is based on a set of simple concepts I often combine into one painting session: value studies, visual note-taking, contour drawing, and painting small.

Each one of these tools has merit on their own, so I thought it might be fun to unpack them individually. This week, I’m exploring value studies.

What is a Value Study?

In art, when we talk about “values” (sometimes also referred to as “tonal value” or “tone”), we are referring to the relative lightness or darkness of something on a scale from pure white to pure black.

Since every color we see has an inherent value, temperature, saturation, and hue, it can be said that value is a subcategory of color. Because value gives our image its underlying structure, however, it is arguably the most important element of all.

A value study, then, is just a preliminary sketch with all those other variables removed. It focuses on one main thing: mapping the darkness and light (or “value structure”) of a given scene.

What’s In It For Me? The Value of Value Studies

You might have heard the cliché, “Value does all the work, but color gets the credit.” It’s true! While color tends to catch the human eye, value establishes the form, depth, and composition of an artwork. One is about taste, the other is about structure. Color is the lime green shag rug contrasted with the orange swag light in the foyer, while value is the foundation of the house.

This is why a monochromatic image with good value structure still works, but a full-color image with poor value organization usually fails (Note that we’re talking about this in the context of representational art, at least for today).

Making a value study creates a roadmap to follow before adding the other elements of color back in, which helps keep us on track when the color and detail begin to distract us mid-painting.

Value As a Design Tool

Values can also be intentionally designed to create a mood or feeling. Keeping in mind that value relationships are relative, we are able to adjust the values of our composition when it suits us.

For example, placing very dark values next to very bright values creates bold effects and a punchier feeling, resulting in a high contrast image. Conversely, a low contrast images use values that are close together for a softer, quieter mood. By intentionally defining the ends of your value scale, you can shift the emotional tenor of your artwork as you like.

Another example: The area of highest contrast in a composition will instantly draw the eye. Knowing this, we can choose to place our darkest dark and lightest light at our focal point, drawing the viewer’s attention like a laser beam. This is composition working in tandem with values. Pretty cool!

Additional benefits of Doing Value Studies:

1. They can double as composition thumbnails. Use the underdrawing of your value study to plot your shapes and spatial arrangement, editing out anything unnecessary or moving elements as needed to balance your composition. Then go in with tone to map your dark and lights. Often, compositional rules and values inform one another, so you’re getting a lot out of one study.

2. Find out what’s worth painting, and quickly. When I’m not sure if a particular scene or reference will make a good painting, I make a quick value study. This instantly gives me an overview of how the arrangement of lights and darks are going to look. Is it an interesting enough composition to paint in the first place? Does it have enough light and dark contrast? If not, you’ve just saved yourself a lot of time and frustration finding out further on down the road.

3. Practicing simplification. Drawing in thumbnail size forces us to throw out detail and simplify the scene into its main, basic shapes. I will often try to to do the drawing in 10 lines or less (a concept borrowed from Scott Christensen) to force my brain to group big shapes and establish clear visual pathways.

*Bonus Benefit for Watercolorists: Value Studies mimic the wash process

*One of the reasons I love doing value studies is that they are like a mini-version of my three-wash watercolor process. This means I can practice seeing like a watercolorist even when I’m away from my paints.

In my watercolor process, the second wash involves painting the mid-tone values and connecting them into one big shape throughout the painting wherever possible. This is often called the “nesting” or “big, connected, middle-shape.” It is the toughest part of a watercolor painting, but having that shape thought out ahead of time can really help take the pressure off. I can even paint from my value study directly if I want to as it really is a true roadmap.

Choosing Your Tools: Find a Method That Works For You

Value studies can be done using almost any medium. The most common is simply using a graphite pencil, changing your hand pressure to create different areas of tone.

Some people prefer using alcohol markers in stepped values, and some use a monochromatic watercolor wash using a pigment like Payne’s Gray or Neutral Tint.

When I’m on the go, I use Pentel brush pens. These cover large flat areas of tone quickly and I only need one gray pen and one black pen, letting the white of the paper serve as my lightest value.

Whatever tool you pick, remember: a value study is not a small drawing or painting.

These studies are simply notes to yourself. They don’t need to be pretty, and shouldn’t take more than 5-10 minutes. This is a research tool, so save the bulk of your creative energy for your painting!

Choosing Your Value Scale: Keep it Simple

What matters more than the medium you pick is the value scale you choose to work with. The number of steps in your scale determines how compressed or detailed your information will be.

Although the real world contains an enormous range of luminance (theoretically infinite!), the human visual system compresses that information into a much smaller range. Even so, our capability to see hundreds of values makes it necessary to simplify even further for use in art. We’ve developed a few value scales for this which have become somewhat standardized over time.

For practical design, our goal is to simplify the complex world into clear, readable masses. Starting with less information forces us to make more sweeping decisions, thereby strengthening the read of our piece.

Some common scales and when to use them:

• 2-Step (Notan): A“Notan” study involves the binary separation of light and dark- no midtones, just black and white. This forces you to ignore detail entirely and test whether your core shapes hold together as a strong design. Though I don’t do these often, I highly recommend you try them out if you have a chance, as they are incredible for learning to simplify complex scenes into compositions that ready clearly and powerfully.

• 3-Step (Light, Midtone, Dark): My daily workhorse. By grouping everything in your scene into light, midtone, and shadow, you lock down the major visual masses and establish form instantly. Think of these 3 values as categories or “buckets” rather than hyper-specific single values. When we aren’t sure which category a value in our image belongs to, we need to round it off one way or another - this is one of the major skills needed when translating the values before us. It’s also where a literal transcription of an image ends and the “design” of our painting begins.

• 5-Step (Highlight, Light, Midtone, Shadow, Deep Dark or “Accents”): This is the bridge between big-picture design and more subtle rendering. It lets you add extreme highlights and deep occlusion shadows while keeping your light and shadow masses clearly separated. This is closer to what I aim for in an actual painting.

• 9-Step (“Full” Range, Denman Ross): The “full” or 9-step value scale was coined by Denman Ross in his 1919 book, ‘The Painter's Palette: A Theory of Tone Relations, an Instrument of Expression,’ and is commonly used by ateliers for academic study. This is fantastic for high-level rendering, but for quick thumbnails, this is usually far more than we need.
  

Before your pen touches the paper, decide on your scale. If you aren’t sure where to start, try a 3-step study. Grouping the world into just lights, mid-tones, and darks is usually all it takes to see if a scene has enough to make a great painting. You can always subdivide these later.

How to Do a Value Study

Here’s how I go about making a 3-step value study, which is my typical method. We’ll use this photo I took of a street corner in Garden Valley, California as our subject. Feel free to try it yourself:

Step 1: Map the Big Shapes w/ a Pencil

I started here by drawing a credit-card sized frame, which works out to be around 2x3 inches. This doesn’t need to be exact and you may want a different aspect ratio to match your scene.

I then used a pencil to plot the main shapes. The lines don’t need to be pretty, but there are a couple things to think about when simplifying this much: What are the core elements of the scene? What is their spatial relationship with one another - which shapes are furthest back or in front, and what lines are essential to make this division of space apparent?

I could have used fewer lines and even fewer shapes here, but I got nervous with you all watching. Did I really need to draw the doors and doorframes, for example? Debatable.

Step 2: Decide your Lights & Lay Down Your Big, Connected Middle-Value Shape

Squint down at the reference and take a look at it with the detail fallen away. This should be help you in determining which areas of the image you want to assign to the lights, and which you want to assign to the midtones/darks. Leave your light value shapes as the white of the paper. Remember that this includes everything in direct sunlight, not just highlights. Since we only have three values to work with, these get lumped together.

Then lay in your midtones, thinking of them as a “nesting”, or big, connected middle-shape. This is the most important part of our value mapping, as it comprises the largest part of the design of our picture. Pay attention to the division of dark and light in your scene, and be willing to round up or down. When doing so, prioritize connections - the shape should be unified as much as possible, traveling throughout your study, rather than a patchy selection of separate shapes. Remember to work around the areas you’ve designated as lights.

^{Tip: Any unobstructed flat plane facing upward in a sunny outdoor scene will be hit have sunlight hitting it. This is often a dead giveaway for elements that belong in the light category. This is why I chose to round the value of the main building’s roof into the light category, even though it very well could have gone either way. This choice also creates a “reversal” here, which is when a progression of values flip flops nicely between dark and light, in succession. Because of this, the light value roof is now “framed” between the dark of the building wall and the dark of the background trees in a pattern of Dark->Light->Dark, which creates visual interest.}

^{Vertical elements (trees, walls, or telephone poles, etc.) tend to receive less direct sunlight when the sun is high because the majority of their surface area faces horizontally - that is, until the sun starts coming from the side as well, as in late afternoon. In our reference, the sun looks to be coming from above, behind, and also quite leftward of our subject, which is why the back of the stop sign still receives such bright light.}

Step 4: The payoff! Add your darks & details

This is the fun part. Adding the darks and occlusion shadows is going to make everything else pop, solidifying the scene into an easily readable image. Try to be sparing with your darks, though - these are potent and draw the eye, so in a sunlit scene, we want a much higher ratio of midtones & lights to darks.

Most of the cast shadows in this scene can be grouped into the midtone category, so those have already been taken care of. Save your darkest tone for occlusion shadows (under the eaves of the roof), darkest shapes (the tires of the vehicle and recesses of its wheel wells - try connected into single shapes!), or anywhere that needs a bit more definition via form shadows (like the dark side of the background trees).

That’s it! A study in 3 values. Now you can pin it up next to your painting and use it as your self-designed roadmap.

I’m really no expert on values or value studies - but trust me, once I discovered this method, it felt like it unlocked a new way of seeing. Value studies are such a quick and effective way to practice the skills needed to translate nature into two dimensions. I actually find them quite fun, too, like little puzzles (but maybe that’s just me 🤓). Hopefully by now, at least, you can see just how flexible, personal, and beneficial value studies can be.

If you’ve followed along above or end up trying this out for yourself, I’d love to hear about it. Tag me on Substack or Instagram, or leave me a comment! 🍂

Soli Deo Gloria,

Kevin 🐊

I usually keep two sketchbooks: One for “proper” sketching & painting, and one to serve as more of a brain dump; this being a no-pressure place for value studies, visual notes, occasional writing, and pure observation practice. These are all from the latter. Lately, I’ve added a 15 minute timed warm-up drawing to my daily routine, so these often get included in my secondary sketchbook, too.

These sketches weren’t made with the intention to be seen (though they are not so “secret” now). However, I noticed that they seem to gather a quiet collective power over time. It also doesn’t hurt that the pocket size allows me to throw the whole thing in my scanner, creating a kind of natural frame. I’ve grown to love watching them collect.

Some days I even prefer the look of these drawings over my more considered work, because they feel the most unfiltered and pure. Just brain workings. You just can’t manufacture the same level of honesty in a carefully considered work of art, which is why these types of sketchbooks are among some of my favorites things to look at by other artists. Of course, if you draw a lot, you’ll occasionally catch a really nice drawing, too. That’s bonus.

Sometimes I use markers, pencils, or even monochromatic watercolor for value studies in my pocket book, but for quick observational drawings (either from life or from reference), I really enjoy how a single pen encourages decisiveness - and also learning to live with your mistakes!

That’s it for now. I would love to know if you enjoyed these! This simple practice of having a place to draw that doesn’t require “finished” or “good” artwork has really transformed my approach to daily sketching by lowering the barrier to entry for this once-perfectionist now learning to enjoy himself deeply. I feel grateful to be alive when I draw and I hope these doodles might inspire you to pick up a pencil or pen sometime soon yourself.

Soli Deo Gloria,

Kevin 🐊

This week I wanted to share with you the way I’ve been structuring my watercolor learning in the studio for daily practice. This is something that has really accelerated my growth in the last few months and I thought someone out there might find it useful.

*Note that I’m talking about watercolor here specifically, but the approach can be applied to any art medium you want to learn. Also keep in mind that this is designed around structured study, rather than painting from life or simply sketching for fun (which are equally important, but topics for another day!).

I don’t know about you, but my neurodivergence means that I have difficulty focusing on things in a linear progression rather than all at once. Because I’ve been self-teaching, it became important to me to cobble together the most helpful tools and concepts I’ve learned so far into a single, simple, and repeatable process.

What this entails are four main “parts” on a single piece of watercolor paper:

1) A thumbnail value/composition study

2) A section for notes

3) A contour drawing

4) A small watercolor painting (the goal!)

What this gives me is a process that includes just about everything I want to be working right now in watercolor at the same time - that is, values, composition, drawing, color & brushwork exercises, and making paintings.

Value Study:

For me, a value study is the heart of my painting, and the beginning of everything. With a small (2x3 inches) box and a bit of quick tone, these thumbnails will help you first decide whether the scene you’re considering painting is worth it before you even begin - is there enough light and shadow contrast to make an interesting painting in the first place? If so, where are the main areas of light and shadow that you will need to be aware of before adding the variable of color? If not, this quick sketch saves you from finding out after you’ve already sunk time into a more detailed drawing or painting.

I do these using a monochromatic watercolor such as Neutral Tint or Payne’s Gray, or sometimes in pen or pencil if it’s in a sketchbook. I don’t bother with the lights, leaving the light of paper. Then I paint the most important part - the big connected middle value shape. This is where my painting is designed.

You can then add the dark details as you like, though sometimes I just leave the middle value shape, as this is the most difficult stage of the watercolor painting. With this serving as your roadmap, the painting becomes much easier!

Written and Visual Note-taking:

The next section is just an area I keep open for notes, both written and visual. Writing things down helps me to internalize, especially when self-teaching. This is based on the belief that experience is the best teacher, but you have to be open to listening to what your own experience is telling you.

For example, I have a ton of books on my shelf on watercolor by various teachers. I love every single one, but when you’re gleaning information from multiple sources, you will inevitably run across contradictions or differences in philosophy or approach– sometimes something one teacher says will be wholly at odds with another. Unless you are lucky enough to be apprenticed under one single master teacher (which I absolutely recommend if you can!), you need to be able to synthesize what works for you out of many different streams of information, and you can’t really know what works for you unless you learn to listen to yourself. Over time, little truths about painting begin to coalesce and assumptions are either confirmed or denied, and these truths become your own.

This is also a great place to make color notes or swatches - I like to make sure I’ve at least written down the color palette I’ve used for that painting, but it can be helpful to plan your color zones as well - which areas of the painting need to be kept warm vs. cool?

Lastly, it’s good to have an area for practice notes. Use this area to verify what’s on your brush - is your consistency and color all good before you lay it down? Try it out here. Or say you are about to attempt painting a type of tree you’ve never painted before, or you’d like to try out a brushstroke or visual effect before you commit to it - this is the place to do it.

You can see that’s exactly what I did for my rocks painting below. I didn’t have much experience painting translucent water over solid objects before, so I tried it out a few times using color thumbnails until I felt I could take it into the painting.

Remember, as watercolorists, we may not have the option to try things out on the “canvas” and adjust from there, as acrylic or oil painters do, but we can experiment and practice all we like - we just need a separate piece of paper!

Contour Drawing:

When I first started in watercolor, the underdrawing was a conundrum for me. My background was in academic drawing - so using slow, comparative measurements and sighting angles to block-in drawings that prioritized accuracy and often took up to two hours to make. When starting out in a medium with no “undo” button, it’s inevitable that you’re going to a fail a bunch of paintings right from the start - so what was the point in doing such a careful drawing if you were almost guaranteed to mess it up? Return on investment here seemed very low were I to take a lot of time in the drawing stage prior to painting.

I’d actually been doing a lot of gesture drawing as I’d been transitioning away from academic techniques in favor of searching for a more personal style. So I decided to try taking that into my watercolor process, but quickly discovered it was not working.

On the one hand, it solved the problem of overly investing too much time into the underdrawing. However, I found that the very looseness of a gesture drawing made it too unpredictable to count on in preparation for a painting. Sometimes, I’d hit on just the right lines in a few minutes and all was great. Other times, my drawings either flat out failed or became too confusing to follow during the painting stage. Eventually, the inconsistency of this led to a huge amount of performance anxiety and stress.

So if one approach to an underdrawing was too rigid, and the other was too loose and uncontrolled, what was the solution?

Enter contour drawing.

Simply put, a contour drawing is a technique where you draw the outer edges and important interior surfaces of a subject using a single, continuous line. The goal is a slow, careful observation of a physical form and recording it, almost as if your pen or pencil is traveling along the contours of the object itself, rather than using 3D forms or other construction-based methods to build out the drawing.

It is about drawing what you see, not what you know. This removes the pressure to get it “right” because it removes the logical thinking required for more construction-oriented drawing - we are merely recording what’s already there, and trusting our eyes to report it factually. I think of it as more like mapping, than making a proper drawing. This is perfect for watercolor, actually, because it prioritizes finding connections and making shapes.

I’ve found that, while contour drawing takes a bit more time than gesture drawing, it is far faster than an academic block-in, and is actually quite relaxing.

Contour drawing also asks us to spend time with our subject prior to our painting it by observing it deeply. This devotes a small amount of time working on pure observation skills every day.

The Painting

I won’t have a lot to say here as it’s pretty self explanatory, but this is the part where I let go of all the preliminary work and just paint. In fact, I think this is the part best left open-ended, because it is the painting that’s going to require different solutions to different problems every time we make a new one. All the preliminary tools I’ve talked about which lead up to and come before this process are like scaffolding or training wheels, designed to help us stabilize as we approach the unknown. But the painting is where we leave off tools and techniques and just go.

The only thing I will add here is that I’ve been keeping my paintings quite small, especially starting out. This has the practical benefit of somewhat reducing the demands of a quickly drying surface area in watercolor, as well as keeping the process relatively quick and low-barrier. As my confidence has grown in color mixing and water control, I’ve found I’ve been scaling up my paintings whenever I feel I can.

And that’s my self-designed watercolor bootcamp! I hope you’ll have found it interesting at least, and that maybe it will inspire some of you to try some of these learning tools, or even better - to design your own!

Until next time 🐊

Kevin
S.D.G.

I feel like I’ve been hitting a decent stride in my watercolor-learning journey lately, and so this month I thought I’d share a few recent paintings with you. It’s sooo cool to finally be able to say this; you have no idea!

I’ve wanted to become a “painter” now for a few years– but painting has not come easy to me, like drawing did.

I can happily report that after a year and a half of near-daily painting, things are beginning to click, mysteries are slowly unraveling, my clumsiness is getting slightly less clumsy; I’m now even more in love with watercolor than when I started.

At first, I thought I’d be an oil painter, but ended up not liking the process all that much. Then I thought maybe gouache was the medium for me. Eventually, however, I fell in love with watercolor… and that was where the real nightmare began.

Just kidding! 😂 But seriously: I have long struggled with color– having only ever used graphite in the past– and for someone with no painting background at all, it can be a doozy to try to learn the fundamentals of color mixing, theory, and all the other painty stuff while juggling the unique variables inherent to the medium of watercolor itself. It has taken me a hot minute to get to the point where I feel I can say I’m making anything even close to being worthy of the term “painting.”

I’m still mostly doing sketches and very small daily paintings (around 5x7), usually along with a thumbnail value study. This helps me to manage variables and keep things quick, but I can’t even express to you how exciting it is to get to the point now where color is feeling more manageable and I’m starting to explore my own sketching style. I still fail lots of paintings, but I got into watercolor because I wanted mileage, not perfection, and I think I’m well on my way to achieving that goal.

Am I good enough to say I’m a “painter” yet? This has ceased to matter. I don’t think you become a painter by means of external validation. Do you paint? Do you go to bed thinking about painting? Do you wake up thinking about it? Do you find Cadmium Red on every available surface of your house? Do you drink turpentine for breakfast? Do you regularly annoy anyone within earshot by standing around saying, “Let me tell you what watercolor can do for your life!” Buy yourself a beret. You’re a painter. ☺️

“The object isn’t to make art, but to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.” – Robert Henri

Genuine Article Magazine Feature

I was super lucky to have been asked by Patrick of Genuine Article Magazine to have some of my writing and drawings featured in their inaugural issue. You can read the Substack version of my article here.

This is an intentionally printed publication all about celebrating the genuine and the tangible, something I think we are all yearning for right now. I am humbled and honored to be among the other artists, photographers, writers, and thinkers in this issue, many of whom (like Miki Ogura or Lawson Chapman, for example), are also fellow Substackers.

This project is really special and I’m extremely proud to have contributed. The magazine reads like a thoughtful literary journal and is a beautiful, hand-held artifact in itself. If you’d like to get a copy or check out the magazine, you can visit the website here 🙏

Greetings from Lookout Mountain!

Lastly, my family and I visited Chattanooga earlier this month, which was big news for us! We realized it was the first time in a decade we’d done any trips, just the three of us, which is crazy. It was about time, and it was a wonderful little respite.

We stayed for two nights on Lookout Mountain in north Georgia, on the border of Tennessee, and already can’t wait to go back. The shipping container home we rented had views extending all the way across Lookout Valley to Sand Mountain tailored for stunning sunsets. It was like living in the clouds!

We also made sure to hit up Cloudland Canyon State Park while we were there, which was fantastic for a foggy morning hike where we were met with some stunning rock formations and waterfalls (I was too wet and sweaty to break out the paint box here, alas).

Kudos to all you urban and nature sketchers who make drawing and painting outside look easy! This was the first time I got to test out an actual travel sketching kit I’d put together and, while I did do a little sketching in pencil and some light wash, I did most of it around our little rental, and not much I’m keen to show.

To me, it was more important that I did it. I got my paintbox out and tried. I’d never had a chance to do this while traveling before (I traveled a lot when I was younger, but wasn’t a visual artist then).

It ended up being a great trial run for how travel sketching might work for me in the future, and more importantly: for how it feels. Did I like it? I think so. But it was certainly more challenging than I expected. Even so, I took lots of photos home with me and continue to use them as a source of inspiration for my studies in the studio. Definitely something to be continued and explored!

That’s all the news that’s fit to print. But before I go, I want to take a moment and welcome all the new subscribers, as well as to thank those of you who’ve been reading for the last year and half:

I can’t begin to express how much your time and attention means to me. Thank you for being here, and for supporting what I do! By the way, would you have a moment for me to share what watercolor can do for your life?

Until next month,
– Kevin 😉 👋 🙏

The Substitution of Mediated Experience for Direct Experience

In my last letter, I raised a question that had been lingering in the back of my mind for years:

If you’re reading this newsletter, you probably know I love drawing and painting. What you may not know is that I had already learned this lesson once before through music.

For nearly twenty years, music was my entire world. Around the time I was studying music in college, affordable recording technology exploded. Suddenly anyone could make albums from home. Endless effects, editing tools, sample libraries, plugins, virtual instruments, and mixing software became available to ordinary musicians at prices that would have been unimaginable a decade prior. It felt revolutionary, and in many way it was.

Professional recordings that once required expensive studios and record label budgets were now within reach of anyone with a laptop and enough determination. Entire categories of artists suddenly had opportunities that simply had not existed before. The barriers to entry dropped, and the gatekeepers lost much of their power. Like most technological revolutions, it solved real problems and opened real doors.

But over time, something else happened. It took me years to notice it because the change was gradual. The center of my practice began to shift. Instead of sitting with an instrument, I spent more and more time sitting at a computer. Recording replaced playing. Editing replaced performing. Music slowly became something assembled piece by piece inside software rather than something experienced in real time.

At first, this felt empowering. You could do everything yourself. Write the parts, record the instruments, mix the tracks, master the album. Eventually, though, I began to notice a strange inversion taking place. The tools that had originally existed to support the music were becoming the thing that occupied most of my attention.

Looking back, I’ve come to think this pattern extends far beyond music. One of technology’s greatest temptations is the substitution of mediated experience for direct experience. The tools meant to support our lives slowly become the place where our lives are lived. This happens because the immediate benefits are so obvious, while the costs are harder to see.

Almost invisibly, our attention shifts away from the experience itself and toward the artifact, outcome, or optimization of that experience. We become preoccupied with capturing the moment, improving the moment, documenting the moment, or reproducing the moment, while spending less time simply inhabiting it.

A funny thing happens when technology removes many of the natural limitations from a creative process. We tend to assume that fewer limitations will lead to more personal work, but often the opposite occurs. When everyone has access to the same sounds, the same effects, the same sample libraries, and the same virtually infinite options, the work can begin to feel strangely detached from the person making it, or worse: homogenized.

I remember noticing that I could identify a particular reverb plugin by ear more easily than than I could identify the actual acoustic space an instrument had been recorded in. Entire orchestral libraries became available to people who had never studied orchestration (hello 👋). Now, guitarists could spend thousands of dollars collecting pedals and effects while spending comparatively little time developing their touch on the instrument itself.

To be clear, none of these technologies are inherently bad. I still use many of them. The problem is subtler than that. Technology influences where our time goes. And where our time goes is ultimately where our lives go.

The danger is not that technology makes things easier. The danger is that it can quietly redirect our attention away from the experience itself and toward the management, optimization, or production of that experience. Creative work slowly becomes content production.

Instead of practicing guitar because you love the instrument, you practice only enough to capture the recording. Instead of playing music all the way through with other people in a room, you spend hours perfecting six seconds of audio alone at a desk.

At some point I realized I was spending entire days on a computer with my guitar sitting beside me untouched. The difficult part was that it had taken so many years to see it that, even if I wanted to step back from technology, my fundamental playing skills had already suffered from lack of practice. Those years couldn’t be recovered.

I do not think this is only a problem in music. We increasingly encounter the world through layers of technology, convenience, and abstraction. The benefits are real. I would not willingly give them up. Yet there is a difference between an experience and a representation of an experience.

The territory is not the map, as they say. Just as a recording is valuable, but it is not the performance.

It wasn’t so much that I was spending too much time in front of a screen, but that I had gradually become separated from the very thing that had drawn me to music in the first place. That realization has stayed with me.

When the Process Becomes the Point

In my opinion, music was always meant to be a living thing.

One of my favorite examples of this is listening to old Grateful Dead recordings. The songs have pre-written structures, and the chords and forms are familiar. Yet every performance becomes its own unique event because the musicians are listening, responding, improvising, and making decisions together in real time.

The magic isn’t found in the existence of the structure. The magic is found in moving through that structure.

A recording captures only one version of what happened that night. One path among countless possibilities. Yet modern recording culture has increasingly conditioned us to treat that frozen version as the definitive one. Audiences often expect live performances to reproduce the album precisely. Musicians feel pressure to recreate every detail perfectly. In some cases, the living performance begins serving the recording rather than the recording serving the living performance. I believe something valuable gets lost in that exchange.

The same realization is part of what eventually drew me toward watercolor.

As I’ve said before, watercolor has many similarities to music, and especially improvisatory music. It unfolds through time. It rewards responsiveness rather than control. It allows for planning, but it also demands participation in the present moment. There is no undo button, nor endless cycles of revisions. No perfect final version waiting at the end of enough adjustments. You have to make a mark. It moves, and you respond. The process matters.

In some ways, watercolor reminded me of what I had loved about music before technology gradually displaced so much of the experience. It returned me to observation, decision-making, improvisation, and direct engagement with the medium itself. That idea has become increasingly important to me over the last few years.

The older I get, the less interested I become in finding the fastest route to an outcome. I still appreciate good tools. I still appreciate technology. But I have become much more protective of the experiences that technology can accidentally replace.

Here are some things I’m actively working on changing in my life to this end (some of which are still out of my comfort zone, and therefore still works in progress):

• Drawing from life instead of relying exclusively on photographs.

• Carrying a sketchbook.

• Playing an instrument rather than editing a waveform.

• Making things with my hands.

• Having conversations face to face.

None of these activities are necessarily the most efficient path toward a finished product. That is exactly my point. Some of the most valuable things in life are not valuable because they help us produce something. They are valuable because of what they do to us while we are engaged in them. That, more than anything else, is what I mean when I talk about process over product.

The product matters. Of course it does. But increasingly, I suspect that many of our modern frustrations stem from confusing the artifact for the experience itself.

The recording is not the music. Just as the finished painting is not the act of seeing!

The process is where we encounter the world directly. It is where we learn, struggle, discover, improvise, and participate. It is where life actually happens. And that is why I have become so absolutely protective of it.

Hi friends 👋,

A few years ago, my artwork centered around highly rendered graphite drawings using a traditional atelier approach. I wasn’t a true atelier student by any means - my somewhat “cartoonish” influences never disappeared entirely - but I’d borrowed my technique from the tradition, spending 2-3 years learning how to block-in, slowly build up, and execute a drawing using the same process as the old masters. I did my own Bargue copies at home (rite of passage for atelier students everywhere), drew vertically on a full-sized easel, and read Harold Speed’s treatise on drawing, cover-to-cover, multiple times. I was a devotee.

On one hand, this approach to drawing is a great fundamental art education. It has worked for artists for a century and continues to do so. It’s an approach that focuses on building skills in a way that is very structured and logical. Anyone can do it, if you’re willing to put in a little (ok, sometimes a lot) of elbow grease.

It’s also great for getting impressive results in a short period of time. I went from rediscovering my childhood love of drawing in 2021 to some really flattering recognition online by 2024, a type of traction I’d never really experienced before.

Before long, however, I started to see some problems with the academic tradition in relation to where I wanted to go.

This article is about what led me to begin steering in a different direction during the foundations of my artistic journey, and why I’d encourage you to place more value on the happiness you get from your process, rather than the end result.

Return on Investment

After an initial learning period, I started producing finished drawings, many of which kept getting more complicated and, therefore, more demanding. After a couple years, as my job got busier and my drawings were taking longer and longer, I realized it might be, I don’t know - good? to actually consider selling some of my work, to at least help justify the investment I was making in time.

Pretty quickly, I learned that I just didn’t feel I could charge what it would take to make it both fair to the buyer and fair to myself, by my own assessment. I certainly didn’t want to punish a buyer just because something is time-consuming to make, especially in a medium like graphite, which is relatively low in materials investment compared to, say, an oil painting.

But I also felt like nothing I could charge with kindness to the buyer in mind would really be all that fair to myself, either.

So I just said no. To every single person that ever inquired about buying a drawing. I traded a piece or two with other artist friends for works of their own, but turned down sales otherwise. The simplicity of keeping numbers out of my art’s worth altogether made me happier than a few extra bucks.

Especially in this day and age, choosing one of the slowest mediums and then trying to create enough work to post content and sell seemed like a recipe for bitterness, unless I was absolutely in love with the process.

Was I? No.

After a good number of these graphite drawings, I noticed that each one kept getting more complex, more time consuming, and more perfect - but I was getting burnt out halfway through the process more frequently. The same teacher I’d had that said ten drawings a month would be very high had also called drawing a “cold passion.” Was this what I wanted?

This led me on a quest to really dig deep and inquire within myself which process I enjoyed the most.

Different Kinds of Depth

But I was still spending a lot of time making these drawings, and where was it taking me? There’s nothing wrong with taking a long time to make a single piece of art. In fact, most really good pieces are made this way. I’ve even said before, “How can you expect the audience to spend a lot of time with your art if you haven’t spent much time making it? Depth rewards depth.”

I still think this is true, but now I’ve realized there are different types of depth. Which type you go for is a personal choice.

You’ve probably heard the Chinese fable about the king who commissioned an artist to paint a rooster. Forgive any imperfections in my recollection, but it goes something like this:

A great King (who apparently had a thing for roosters) commissions an artist to to paint a portrait of one, but the artist has an unusual request: he needs three years to do it. Reluctant, but aware the artist was regarded as the best in the land, the King concedes.

Three years pass and the King calls the artist to his courtroom, demanding, “Where is my rooster?!”

Calmly, the artist turns to a blank sheet of paper and in three minutes, proceeds to paint the most beautiful, lifelike rooster in paint that the King has ever seen.

The king was even more furious now: “If you could paint it so quickly,” he asked, “why did you make me wait all this time??”

The artist then led the king to a large house at the back of the palace, where, within, thousands of sketches, notes, and diagrams of roosters are stacked to the ceiling. The artist then explains to the King that while it may have taken three minutes to paint the rooster, it took three years to learn how to paint it in three minutes.

There is a kind of depth that comes from laboring over a single work for weeks or months, refining every edge and slowly building toward completion. But there is another kind of depth that comes from mileage - from years of accumulated observation, repetition, experimentation, failure, and practice.

One form of depth is visible in the artifact itself. The other is stored invisibly inside the artist.


Mileage versus Refinement

I remember kind of sitting up in my seat the first time I heard my teacher refer to “making ten drawings a month” as an example of exceptionally large output. We weren’t talking sketches here anymore - these were Drawings with a capital “D.”

This approach to drawing has a lot to offer in terms of building discipline, stamina, and sharp observational skills, but I found there was one inherent problem: it trades mileage for refinement.

You’ve probably heard it said that it’s better to paint ten small paintings in a month than one giant one. The argument goes something like this:

• Each painting presents the artist with a unique set of problems to solve.

• Therefore, we gain more experience by painting ten paintings than we do with one, as this requires us to solve more sets of problems, regardless of size.

• Experiencing the entire process frequently also builds more comfort with two of the most challenging parts of the artistic process: starts and finishes.

Over years of countless sketches, thousands of piles of drawings, scrawls, and notations - many of which look more like chicken scratch by themselves - one may eventually find that, when it comes time to execute a drawing, it’s done in three minutes but contains a lifetime of mileage behind it.

What I’ve come to understand about art is that there is no single realm (whether that be approach, technique, or school of thought) that contains every answer. Art, like life, is more like a series of branching paths than a bullet train on rails. If you’ve made camp at a roadside destination along the way, great! But there’s plenty more to see.

I also don’t regret academic drawing at all. In many ways, it gave me the very foundation necessary to eventually begin asking these questions in the first place. The structure, discipline, observational training, and deep concentration muscles are all invaluable gifts. I still believe strongly in fundamentals.

But foundations are meant to support a house, not become the entire house itself, right?

Conclusion

Just this week, a young artist on Instagram sent me a message expressing how much my graphite drawings meant to them and whether I had any tutorials about making drawings that way. And nowadays, I have to stop and consider a bit harder before I reply with my recommendations.

Each person is on their own path, and for some, academic drawing is absolutely the right way to go. I don’t regret my foundation in it at all, either. In fact, I’m sure the truths I discovered there will become useful to me once again in a kind of synthesis, whenever I’m ready.

But I’m personally on a path to discover my own voice, and I’ve sacrificed something for this. That is the immediate rewards and recognition of drawing in a way which takes twenty hours but produces an impressive result, for a much less predictable and impressive in the short term - series of attempts at daily mileage, joy, and discovery.

My past experience in music has made this choice feel clearer, even when it is not easy. I’ve learned what it looks like to slowly drift away from the original thing you loved, while still becoming increasingly “good” at the system built around it.

My art today may look “worse” than it did a few years ago, but let me tell you this: I wake up every day thrilled to get back into it.

And this, I believe, is what will sustain me for a long-term practice that eventually gets me where I want to go.

There’s a certain bravery required in leaving behind a path with obvious markers for one that feels less defined. Especially when the new path produces fewer immediate rewards. Mileage sure seems to be a lot messier than refinement. Just as voice is slower than imitation, and discovery is harder to measure than polish.

I think it’s going to take me much, much longer to get where I’m going this way in drawing and painting. But I know now from experience that when I arrive this time, I’ll arrive with my freedom intact.

Watercolor is particularly infamous for being unforgiving to newcomers. I read a Reddit user’s assessment of watercolor as likened to trying to learning the fundamentals of art on a motorcycle on a high-wire while juggling swords. I laughed out loud, albeit a bit knowingly. It’s an incredibly accessible medium on one hand - only requiring water and pigment, simple equipment, easy clean up - but one that can’t quite ever be completely controlled.

And I’ll be honest with you, dear readers - I wanted to quit recently. 😅

As much as I’d love to sit here and be the perfect example of what I preach, alas! It turns out I’m much too human. Watercolor has given me both so much joy and so much frustration at times, that I’ve had to consider whether I’m not cut out for the particularly high-angle learning curve in this medium.

After all, gouache gives me a lot of the things I love about watercolor, but with the option to paint over mistakes. It also suits my previous drawing style, which was academic in approach and tends to use straighter lines and blocky shapes.

So I started painting more in gouache. But what happened was that, in doing so, I got better at watercolor.

Gouache encourages me to slow down and be a bit more deliberate in my shape designs and color choices. This is what I love about it. However, I always start to miss watercolor after a couple days painting in gouache because I much prefer the process of watercolor painting, even if it is often harder to get a good result.

What I don’t prefer about gouache (at least for now) is what Frank Webb calls the “muckety-muck” of opaque mediums. After using watercolor, every other medium tends to feel like you’re painting with mud. Watercolor is loose and free by comparison, almost a kinetic experience much more akin to time-based arts like performing music.

And these qualities are exactly what makes watercolor so frustrating initially. Much like jazz, a good watercolor painting is a kind of improvisation in real time - something that appears spontaneous, but wouldn’t be possible without the unseen countless hours of practice to back it up.

So, during my moment of self-percieved “weakness”, I had a few days where I had decided that maybe it was time to go all in on gouache, commitment to watercolor be damned. It was going to allow me to correct mistakes and therefore have a healthier day to day relationship with my art practice. I would continue learning watercolor, but accept the fact that it would be a ten years before I would be able to call myself a “watercolor painter”, and so consider shifting to gouache as a main driver for producing more predictable work in the mean time.

Then watercolor starting calling me back, like a siren song.

I missed the joy of the colors exploding and blending together on the page, I missed the feeling of paints swirling and swishing in my palette, mud-free, I missed the moments of utter delight and surprise through happy accidents that only a fluid and alive medium like watercolor can provide. I missed the dance.

Gouache was safer, sure. But watercolor still held an allure that nothing else does for me, and I began to realize I could not live without it.

So I didn’t.

Instead of choosing one over the other, I started to let them speak to each other. I began to see that gouache wasn’t a replacement for watercolor, but it was a counterweight. Where watercolor asks me to let go, gouache asks me to decide. Where watercolor rewards boldness and timing, gouache rewards patience and structure. One loosens my grip; the other steadies my hand. And somewhere between the two, I’ve started to find a rhythm that feels sustainable.

Gouache has given me an anchor. something solid to stand on when I feel like I’m slipping. It helps me think more clearly about shapes, edges, and color relationships. It slows me down just enough to see what I’m actually doing. It allows me to carve, like an architect, which I truly love. It leaves open a doorway back into oil painting one day, should I decide to try again.

But watercolor is still the thing that makes me feel alive when I paint.

And something unexpected happened when I returned to it again, not as an escape but as a choice. It was better. Not dramatically, not magically. Subtly, but enough to notice.

Some of that improvement, I’m sure, came from what gouache taught me. But I also recognized something else: that difficult first year (the one filled with awkward washes, backruns, muddy passages, and more “failures” than I can count) had quietly been doing its work the entire time.

The mileage mattered. The days mattered. Even the frustrating ones. I had crossed some invisible threshold without realizing it.

And I feel so grateful for that now, because I know how easily I could have walked away before getting here. If I had backed off too much, or let frustration make the decision for me, I wouldn’t be experiencing this shift. I wouldn’t now be feeling this small but meaningful sense of progress, of things beginning to click. It was also a lesson in flexibility - no one is forcing me to choose one medium forever, and sometimes working in another medium for a little while can shift your perspective in a way that is helpful when taken back to your main one.

I’m still very much at the beginning. But for the first time, it feels like the beginning of something opening up, rather than something I’m trying to push through, which is so totally awesome.

And maybe that’s the real lesson I’m learning: not just how to paint, but how to stay painting. Thanks for reading.

* Optional background audio as you read this week’s letter: springtime birds recorded on a walk through a quiet industrial park in Portland, OR, 2011. :)

Hello friends,

Just a quick note here to say hello and share with you a few of the things that I’ve been up to as Spring arrives in my little corner of the world.

I’m thinking of making this kind of casual letter a regular thing, alternating with the slightly heftier newsletter topics I occasionally like to write about. Think of these as little “notes from the studio” - which is really just my office/living room/bedroom…but it’s where I paint 😅.

Since this is the first of these, it might be a good moment to tell you a bit about who I am:

• My name is Kevin 👋 I’m 45, married, a stepdad, and a lifelong artist

• I spent almost 20 years pursuing music pretty seriously. You can hear that here. My degree is also in music

• I’m currently on indefinite hiatus from music after a deep burnout, in part sparked by years of tying my self-worth too tightly to work and output

• I rediscovered my childhood love of drawing in 2021, which quietly shifted my life and my approach to creativity

• These days, I’m learning watercolor, gouache, and drawing again, all with a beginner’s mind. I’m sharing that process here, and on Instagram.

• I believe art is synonymous with life. I have never known a true principle gleaned from art that does not have a nearly 1 to 1 relationship to the understanding of life, in at least some small way, shape, or form.

• And that’s what I’m here for. Sharing some of the things I’ve learned in my 20+ years of daily creative practice while encouraging people to explore their own creative potential, and perhaps to bring a little more love into the world
  
  If you’re new here, welcome! And thank you so much for reading. :)
  

  ---

Guatercolor 2.0

I’ve been experimenting in gouache along with watercolor over the past couple months, and while I think the process is quite different from that of using watercolor alone, it really is a ton of fun working opaquely at times. I have always drawn in a structural manner, which suits gouache quite well.

The great thing about watercolor & gouache is how closely they are related. This means you can literally use them together on the same palette. Right now, I keep a full set of watercolors in a travel palette and a single tube of white gouache on hand so I can switch between them as needed with little to no change to my setup. I’m still exploring gouache, but this is working for me now, and keeps my ADHD brain from freaking out over changing gears with materials or process too frequently.

Thanks for stopping by the studio with me. Until next time! - Kevin

*Note: Feel free to drop me a reply but know that I’ve been having Substack replies get forwarded to my junk mail folder. While I continue trying to work this out, you’re welcome to also use my email address directly: kevinscottdavis.gw@gmail.com . I’d love to hear from you!

Hello friends,

This month I came across an idea that immediately helped me in my watercolor learning journey - I wanted to share it with you in case it sparks something in your own work too.

The concept is one that I’d seen suggested before, but it really hadn’t sunk in until I paired it with a supporting idea. Sometimes our knowledge-building is not linear, especially when self-teaching. Concepts you hear about today might not fully *click* until you have some necessary understanding somewhere else.

The idea I’m talking about here using only two colors in a watercolor painting. Warm and cool. That’s it.

But why?

Limited palettes are not news to artists, as they are widely known to simplify the painting process while increasing color harmony in a work. Color mixtures and variations born of a tightly knit set of “mother colors” in a three or four-color palette each contain a bit of one another in themselves. This inherent relationship to one another makes them naturally harmonious and pleasing to the eye.

Here are a few example of works made with limited palettes. (These paintings in particular predominantly pair a warm color against a cool one, but I’ll get to that later):

A lot of my struggle with painting so far has revolved around color. Despite the fact that everyone says value is more important than color, and to just get your values right first, I still struggled every time I went to translate those values into color.

I spent a 2-3 years learning to draw using academic techniques in graphite, which is monochromatic by nature, of course. It was great for studying values, form, proportion, and design - but not color, and maybe even more crucially: not temperature.

So when I jumped into watercolor and was suddenly juggling the whole host of new variables that painting adds - brush handling, color mixing, palette organization - not to mention those inherent to watercolor as a medium: water to pigment consistency, drying time, chasing the bead, avoiding highlights, softening edges, wet on wet vs. wet on dry vs. wet on damp… 😮‍💨 - it’s really no surprise that things fell apart fast.

Color was brand new to me, and learning it inside of such a tricky medium felt near impossible by just “winging it,” especially under the pressure of a quickly drying wash.

I tried using limited palettes - the three-color concept seemed simple enough: use three primary colors (a blue, a red, a yellow) and nothing else, or maybe a Zorn palette for portraits, but my results were still chaotic and uncontrolled. What was happening? As much as I was able to practice watercolor in monochrome, I just did not seem to be able to translate those value studies into color ones.

Well, watercolor is a living paint. It is not like other mediums in this respect.

When we place pigment onto paper with watercolor, it doesn’t stay put. It explodes and blooms and swirls and travels on the page, contacting other colors and forming into new shades and variations as it takes its course.

This makes even three colors in watercolor seem like a hundred at times, potentially much more chaotic than it might in an opaque medium. Even just three colors mingling together in various combinations on the paper can result in a lot of surprises, and, depending on which colors you are using: potentially infinite shades of gray.

But the same thing that makes watercolor so elusive and even frustrating for beginners is the thing that makes watercolor such a medium of total freedom:

Color just doesn’t matter in watercolor as much as temperature does.

Here’s how I broke things down in order to limit my variables and get my foot into the door of color in watercolor without feeling overwhelmed:

The idea here is to go beyond the typical grisaille or monochrome palette from value study to something that introduces temperature. Don’t treat it like a full color or even limited palette painting - thinking of it as a temperature study will focus and simplify your effort, much like a value study would. Meanwhile, the color is going to naturally incorporate itself by means of the process (really!).

1) With a warm color and a cool one, practice mentally assigning one to the lights, and one to shadows. Ask yourself: “Are my shadows going to be cool?” If yes, then everything in the shade gets my cool color (say blue). Everything lit by the sun gets my warm color (Burnt Sienna, yellow ochre, or whatever you have chosen. It doesn’t matter, as long as its warm). This keeps your design organized and clear but removes any chasing of local color, which is important here.

2) For more subtlety, you can let your two colors mix (on the palette or the paper) to create a third color (for example, when your two chosen colors are blue and yellow, they will of course make a green), or sometimes a gray, which is often more subtle and beautiful.

This is fantastic for areas that transition from light to shadow, or just to place more variety in your shadow areas - as the presence of both colors tends to darken this mix.

3) In this way, all you need to worry about is how dark or light each color you are using is, and whether the warm and cool relationships are relatively consistent. This will result in a harmonious, if simple, color result that unfolds naturally and easily, and is a great example of watercolor’s ability to “paint itself.” See below for some examples:

You will be surprised to see that a bright blue tree trunk will read naturally because it works in the context of your temperature assignments (my blue was my shadow color, and I only had one choice, so I used it), not because it has anything to do with a tree bark’s natural color. As you can imagine, this blows wide open the doors to personalized expression and design choices.

Note: When choosing your two colors, you can opt for a complimentary pair (opposites on the color wheel), which will result in some form of gray when mingled together, giving great options for gradations and transitions, OR you can decided on something a bit more analogous, such as blue and yellow, resulting in a stronger third color (green), like I did in the thumbnail sketch below.

Some people will lean towards chasing local color a bit more, and that’s fine. But for me, the freedom here is liberating. Watercolor is so much about inviting the viewer to fill in the missing information by way of participation - whether it is in the combining of shapes or abstraction of color, or both.

Below is a recent sketch I made using this concept of extreme limitation of color as a starting point. I did add a yellow ochre in the sky and grasses, but everything else was painted using only cobalt blue + burnt sienna, even all the subtle color shifts across the rocks.

And that’s really what I wanted to share with you. Keep in mind, this is what I’ve found to be a good way for me to ease into color without overwhelm - but it’s only a starting point.

It’s not always true that shadows are cool and lights are warm, for example, and eventually you will want to learn to handle the set of problems presented by each of your paintings with flexibility and sensitivity to its own unique context, - but as a beginner, I have found this simple breakdown to be one of the most helpful steps for me personally on my way into color painting. I hope you mind find it useful as well.

Let me know if you’d like to see more of these “studio lesson” newsletters. I’m still new to watercolor, but I feel that I will be making it my home for quite some time, and I’m always happy to share with you what I’m learning a long the way. Let’s learn together.

Thanks for reading and have a lovely day 🐊

- Kevin

Art, however, and as always, and always and always and always - provides therapy like nothing else will. One thing that I’ve discovered this winter, is how much I truly love drawing and painting scenes appropriate to the season.

I’d always heard snow was kind of difficult to paint, etc. Absence of color, but not really being white either, etc. But honestly, I haven’t really found that to be so. I’m no expert, of course - and I’m still in my learning phase of watercolor sketching - but I’ve found wintery forest scenes to be one of my favorite subjects I’ve ever drawn.

These scenes make me feel calm, and the relative absence of color saturation has actually made for a pretty good entryway for me trying to learn color mixing - though, as you can see, at least half or more of my sketches are still what I consider monochromatic values studies. Point being, nevertheless, simplicity. Winter is absence. Absence of noise. Absence of striving. Absence of movement. Absence of complexity.

But the light. That beautiful, diffused light, softly multiplied off every inch of snow in every direction so that the world glows and glistens in that magic way no other time of year matches. It takes ones breath away.

“and then the snow, like silence coming from the sky…” – Louise Glück

Can you hear the silence, too? Can you feel the earth asleep beneath your feet? It is at rest, and generating anew, preparing for a new birth in the glorious springtime. Steadily, quietly, with dignity. And so will I.

Thanks for reading. I’m so glad you are here.

- K

Hello Friends,

Since last newsletter, I’ve had the fortune to enjoy a slower season of life leading up to the holidays. I’m still working as a part-time tutor, as well as managing a very part-time music career in the background, but mostly feel I’ve been dropped off a speeding train suddenly, after finishing 2 years of UX Design school and a recent equity-based position at a music tech company. As the new year approaches, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about my experiences, and reassessing goals and hopes for the future.

One thing that’s been on my mind, especially with the increasingly rapid proliferation of AI, is that maybe we are approaching a turning point. For decades, science and technology have received the bulk of our cultural resources and attention, largely because that’s where the money is. Along the way, the humanities (things like poetry, history, literature, philosophy, art) have been steadily pushed to the margins, as suggested by data from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

But as machines become more capable of producing content and replicating outputs once thought uniquely human, there seems to be a growing hunger for the things they can’t touch: meaning, character, moral formation, taste, sensibility. I was talking with my wife recently about how it feels as though we may be standing on the edge of a quiet renaissance of sorts. Valuing education not for market value, but for spiritual development. A return to wrestling with faith, ethics, beauty. Because, for all the wonderful advancements the tech world has handed us, the most ancient of human questions still remains when the dust is settled: what is the meaning of life?

This is where art, poetry, and the things people make with their hands begin to feel refreshingly vital. Not as decoration or content, but as acts of attention and care. Thinking for thought’s sake. Looking for the sake of seeing more clearly. Making something because it’s something out of nothing.

I tend to believe that most of the world’s problems, especially America’s current political divide, will never be solved by politics alone. Change starts at the individual level depending on any given person’s moral, spiritual, and personal development. Individuals come together to create communities, who then create collective values to share. When the individuals comprising the group are self-actualized (Maslow), the functions of the greater whole are of inherently higher quality. It behooves all of us to seek answers ourselves and develop our moral stance, our values, our dreams, avoiding the inevitable homogenization of ideals and beliefs spoon-fed from algorithmically curated sources.

Billionaires may appear to have monopolized the upper hand (money, power, insulation from consequence), but they can’t take it with them when they shuffle off the coil, remember. At the end of life, they face the same dark mirror we do: naked as we came, alone, passing through whatever mystery lies on the other side.

This is good news, for the rest of us. Because poetry is, generally speaking, free.

If you’re poor, I’ve got good news for you. If you’re downtrodden, have I got good news for you. If you’re heartbroken, I’ve got some good news for you, for once.

The clouds above the heads of billionaires are the same clouds above ours - equally luminous, equally free of charge. The same light falls on all of us. The same questions belong to all of us. Meaning, beauty, truth, love, and attention. These remain stubbornly democratic. They cannot be monopolized, optimized, or hoarded.

Over the past few years, I’ve spent a great deal of time inside systems that measure worth almost entirely in terms of efficiency, growth, and market value. Finishing a UX design program and then failing to land a role within that world forced a reckoning, not so much with my skills, but with my values. What became increasingly clear is that many of the things I care about most (attention, depth, refinement, moral seriousness) are difficult to justify in spaces organized primarily around scale and profit.

If anything, those who feel overlooked or emptied out by the world may be closer to the essential work. When the illusions of winning fall away, what remains is the chance to attend, to cultivate the inner life, to develop character and sensibility, to take part, quietly and faithfully, in the long human conversation that has always mattered more than power. The development of one’s soul, in my belief, never returns void.

If I could bet there’s anything that can be taken with us into the next life, well, consider me doubled-down.

Secret Sketchbook

What started out as a “secret sketchbook” (an idea borrowed from artist Jared Cullum which he explains at length in this video) obviously isn’t secret if I’m sharing it with you, but mine has become something of my own over the last year, and I still use the name as a bit of a cheeky endearment.

I keep two sketchbooks simultaneously. One for paintings or more finished studies, and one just for thinking. I found that, after I started painting, my offhand sketchbook became more of a place where I go to look for answers to things I’m curious about, rather than “artwork people might see”. I’ve found that the sketches appear naturally and constantly now, rather than consciously sitting down to make them. It’s more of a notebook, and the medium almost doesn’t matter. I’m still not making tons of what I would considered “finished” work, or even complete drawings, but my mileage has really increased in the last year, which was a personal goal of mine. Draw less preciously, but draw constantly. I still believe drawing is the most important part of a good art practice, but it’s become more like the fuel to the fire, always happening in the background.

“The object isn’t to make art, it’s to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.” — Robert Henri

Guatercolor?

Oh. My. Gouache! Not a lot to say here, other than that I’ve recently begun experimenting adding gouache to my watercolor practice, and I’m really enjoying it so far. It was, in fact, books like Nathan Fowke’s “How to Paint Landscapes Quickly and Beautifully” or Jim Gurney’s YouTube videos that originally sent me down the water-based painting media path in the first place, but I was so stunned off the bat by watercolor, that I’ve been spending all my time at the first stop. For a long time, I’d imagined a hybrid approach (using both watercolor and gouache interchangeably, or using watercolor for a first wash and then going opaque in subsequent layers) would be a nice thing to do “some day”, but I’d never really tested it because I was so in love with watercolor. But now I’m beginning to see the possibilities of using both, which are essentially the same paint, only with different binders. More on this soon, but you can see in the example below that, while watercolor lends itself to quick, poetic impressions of light and dark, gouache can be a little bit more structural, which is copacetic with how I naturally draw.

Best Books of 2025

Lastly, I thought I’d end with what’s becoming a yearly tradition of listing my favorite books I read in the last year.

I spend a lot of time reading these days, but it’s a quite pleasurable kind of reading - one area of my life I reserve for pure fun and inspiration, rather than participation in craft or even intellectual growth. Of course, when you love something in this way, you end up doing it a lot, and those things often circle back as natural benefits.

Most of what I read is fiction. I read over 40 books this year (December’s not over, but we’ve got to put a pin in it here), so these are the best of the best, in the order I read them. Hopefully you might find something to enjoy here in the upcoming year as well!

1. Intermezzo by Sally Rooney (2024)

2. A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles (2016)

3. Playground by Richard Powers (2024)

4. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver (1998)

5. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry (1985)

6. The Lions of Al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay (1995)

7. Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner (1987)

8. North Woods by Daniel Mason (2023)

9. The Shipping News by Annie Proulx (1993)

10. Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton (2023)

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy New Year, and whatever else you might be celebrating as 2025 comes to a close. I’m praying blessings for you and your family in the next year. Take heart: the poetry at your library is free! 🎄

- Kevin

Hi friends,

Here we are in the last month of autumn. I don’t know about you, but it’s been a period of transition to match the season in our household of late.

This fall I wrapped up two years with Springboard, including a full year of job searching + career coaching, an internship, and work with a startup. It’s been a long season of effort without the outcome I hoped for (landing a new job), so now I’m giving myself permission to breathe a bit and listen for what’s next. Painting and drawing have been the steady stuff through all of it, and I’m feeling more committed to them than ever.

One of the highlights of October was joining Cane Yo’s month-long sketchbook challenge. The goal was simple, but not easy: fill an entire sketchbook in a month. I ended up doing just that, though not in the way I expected. Midway through the month, my dog passed away, and I was simply too heartbroken to paint or draw for the first time in years. My grandfather had passed away not two weeks prior. When I finally returned to the sketchbook, finishing those last pages became a quiet way of closing some significant chapters in my life. I didn’t finish on time, but finished it for myself, in November.

Here are a few spreads from the book:

Lately my art practice has been centered around learning watercolor, which is still proving quite tricky after 8 straight months! But I am enjoying exploring the medium more deeply, building habits, and learning to see as a painter, not just a draftsman. The more I lean into daily or near-daily practice, the the more natural it feels. I’m planning to spend the rest of the year painting, praying, and getting clear about what I want my creative life to look like in 2026.

And since this newsletter is still finding its shape, I’d love your input. What would you enjoy seeing more of?

• My own art and process

• How-to’s, studies, or technique breakdowns (I may not be there yet for painting, but this could be for drawing)

• Thoughts on creativity and the artistic life

• Artist inspirations, quotes, recommendations

• Occasional interviews or conversations

• Something else entirely?

Feel free to reply directly. I’ve got some ideas banging around for next year and I genuinely want to know!

To close, here’s a sketch from yesterday. I think it shows how painting is feeding back into my drawing, especially in terms of the organization and simplification of values.

So while painting remains an uphill challenge for me, drawing is getting ever easier and more free as I lean into my own style, which is very exciting for me!

Thanks for reading and for being here. Even in a year of uncertainty, sharing work and connecting with you has been grounding for me and I look forward to doing it so much more!

Until next time,

Kevin

I thought I’d do something fun today and let you have a sort of unfiltered look at some scans straight out of one of my recent sketchbooks. This little Hahnemühle A5 watercolor book has been my companion through August and September as I’ve been learning to sketch more directly with paint. I’ve kept this in my free time outside of work and school mostly just for “thinking out loud”. Most of what you’ll see here are value studies, notes, and experiments (often in Payne’s Gray) as I get used to watercolor. It’s not a cotton book either, so I’m painting on “bad” paper here, but I appreciate that it takes a certain amount of pressure away.

I always like seeing the unedited side of artists’ sketchbooks - sometimes even more than their finished works. It’s bit scary for me to leave these here as I’m only just starting to get my footing with watercolor and painting in general, but I’m happy to share my progress with you all as well. It does take time. Here’s whats happening along the way, honest as it gets. But not without a few happy surprises, I’d say!

I hope you are all well and I will see you soon (with LOTS more sketches and painting next month, as I will be joining the Cane-Yo Sketchit challenge in October. 🍂

Until next time,

Thanks for following along with me here in my newsletter, and hello to all the new subscribers! I’ll be back with more soon, but for now I hope these pages offer a little window into the quiet (and often humbling) work of learning and discovery. Wishing you a good start to fall and plenty of time for your own experiments.

- Kevin 🐊

Hi friends,

Apologies for the short interruption in newsletter frequency (I’m sure you hardly noticed, but I missed July 🫣). Over the last couple months, I wrapped up a Jr. Product Design internship with PAPER and started a new position as Founding Designer at a small startup called LabAMI. I got a taste of a very full schedule that had little to do with art. Respect to all the moms, dads, and full-time career workers out there consistently making art on top of it all.

That said, I have found that keeping my art practice separate from affords a lot of creative freedom. When I was working in music, it sometimes paid the bills, sometime didn’t - but when it did, I had no time to enjoy what I was doing, and when it didn’t, all I could do was worry about that it wasn’t. I had forgotten what it meant to play for fun, and my sense of joy and discovery suffered. I know many people who have managed to balance this far better than I ever did, but everyone has to find their level of sustainability. Now, 100% of what I make is for pleasure & personal growth on my own terms, and that has been really good for me.

I’m not either a full product designer yet (the market is tough; I’m mostly working free for the sake of experience), but I’m two years into an attempt at the transition, and it’ll be God willing whatever happens next. All the while, drawing and painting anchors me and gives meaning to my life, whether it is my job for now or not. And I’m happier than I’ve been in years. I hope you will try it.

Watercolor

I’ve been in a phase of discovery the last 8 months, moving away from highly rendered graphite portraits for the chance to experiment with new mediums and approaches. Things like gesture drawing, observational drawing directly in ink, and water-based mediums. All of these encourage a more direct and spontaneous approach to art, which is something that supports my current lifestyle (and limited time).

Well, it feels like I’m at the threshold of a convergence once again, and what I’ve discovered was not something I expected:

If you had told me a year ago that I would be deciding to make watercolor a major focus, I would likely have thought you were … well, probably pretty smart and open-minded to say such a thing, but likely wrong. Watercolor has suffered in terms of its reputation a lot for various reasons, some of which are pretty valid. But the main (mis)understanding I had personally was that it always seemed to be the domain of, frankly… just some of the most atrocious art ever made, to my taste 😂

I’m talking about pastels. Chintzy florals. Whites so white they burn holes in my retinas. At worst, a blotchy, transparent mess devoid of form. At best, probably a hell of a lot of boats in harbors. Child’s pictures. Cheap paint.

I had it dead wrong. And here’s what I’ve been learning:

What I’ve discovered is that watercolor, in the right hands, is one of the most design-driven, shape-conscious mediums out there. My recent explorations led me to the California Watercolor School of the 1920s–50s, a group who broke away from careful realism to embrace bold composition, simplified shapes, and fearless value structure. They used large, decisive shapes locked together in strong design, yet alive with luminous washes and textures. A lot of the painters during this era ended up in or around the Chouinard Art Institute, which had direct ties to animation studios like Disney, etc. at the time. So this cross-semination of illustrators/animators and fine art painters, both using watercolor as a perfect medium for observational painting outdoors, led to an art style that has resonated deeply with me for two reasons:

1) These painters could draw. Really well. You can see in their shapes and designs a mastery over drawing, gesture, and stylization borrowed from the world of animation.

2) A California regionalism, which is my own birth state.

These things strike a chord with me. As a kid, I had been transfixed by Eyvind Earle’s painting of California landscapes (he also did the background paintings for Disney’s Sleeping Beauty), which I first encountered in a Carmel gallery. He did things to stylize and design his landscapes I had never experienced before, and thought it was just magical.Earle specialized in oils and serigraphs in his late career, but he did teach himself to paint through watercolor (at 10 years old, his dad gave him a choice to make one watercolor painting or read 50 pages each day and he chose both!).

Most of my life, I’ve held Earle as something of a north star favorite, but never really found artwork that was quite like his. Now see the same structural clarity and stylization in these California School watercolors, which shares the same strong sense of design and stylization of nature as Eyvind’s work. Eyvind wouldn’t have been part of the California School, which came earlier, but he would no doubt have been influenced by it, especially as a watercolorist in his formative years.

Below are some examples of the so-called “California Style”:

Tracing further, I stumbled across another lineage through Edgar Whitney, whose students like Frank Webb, Tony Couch, Naomi Brotherton, and Skip Lawrence taught an approach rooted not in rendering “things,” but in orchestrating design, value, and rhythm into a unified whole.

This has totally reframed my earlier misconception of watercolor as an amateur or child’s medium. In truth, it’s often said to be one of the most difficult to master! Mistakes are rarely correctable, and every stroke counts. Where oils or acrylics invite revision, watercolor demands decisiveness: if it doesn’t work, you start fresh on a new sheet. That challenge is part of its appeal for me. It’s direct, poetic, and spontaneous- it feels like walking a tightrope, and it’s helping me cultivate fearlessness, mileage, and expression.

If nothing else, watercolor has given me a doorway into becoming a painter, foremost. It’s accessible: I need only water, a small tin of paints, and paper. That gets me in and out of the painting process fast, which leads to repetition. It can also travel anywhere, encouraging me to step out into the world to observe. It’s a medium I can see myself carrying, in some form, for the rest of my life.

Thanks for reading. I have a lot more to say about watercolor, and other artists to share with you, but I’ll keep that for next time. If you’d like to learn more about the California Watercolor School, or the later Edgar Whitney school painters, I’ve collected some links for further exploration below.

A Brief History of California Watercolor

www.californiawatercolor.com

www.eyvindearle.com

Gallery 21 (Earle’s gallery in Carmel)

A link to my Pinterest watercolor board with some recent discoveries

A video of a recent watercolor demonstration by Thomas Schaller at AWS


Until next time! 🐊

- Kevin

Lately I’ve been spending a lot of my drawing time in a small sketchbook I’ve designated for one thing only: direct drawing. That is, drawing straight with ink, from observation, with no underdrawing, no erasing, and no edits. It’s become a practice I’m learning a lot from, and even starting to love.

Sketchbook Peek

A few recent pages from my “direct drawing” sketchbook—fountain or brush pen only, mostly drawn from life (also a couple from photos or news articles, and one from imagination).

What Drawing Directly in Ink Is Teaching Me

Learning to Think Before I Draw

Each mark, ideally, has to count for something. Once ink hits the paper, there’s no erasing. While that seemed a bit scary at first, it also felt thrilling- and honestly, very freeing.

Not being able to trade one line out for something “better” forces more confidence. It also teaches you to work with what you’ve got. Mistakes become incorporated into the whole. And it’s surprising how much you can get away with- the human eye values the truth of overall proportion and composition far more than it cares about a small detail or two out of place.

Learning to Be Less Precious

When I’m in my “direct-drawing-only” sketchbook, I have to let go of fear. I know I’m going to make a lot of mistakes. Jared Cullum- one of several artists who’ve inspired me to draw this way- likens it to fishing. It’s not about the catch, but the act of casting. Once in a while, you might land something really good. Most of the time, the point is to be engaged in observation while putting in as much mileage as you can. No one even needs to see this sketchbook but you - “algorithmic pressure”, as I like to call it, is as unnecessary as you’d like it to be.

The goal is to develop hand/eye dexterity while becoming more connected to the world around you. That said, I guarantee that if you try doing this for any length of time, you’ll end up with some drawings you quite like. Another analogy is shooting a roll of analog film. Among photographers, what they call a “keeper rate” is an expected percentage of photos worth keeping from a roll or shoot. With analog photography, it was often expected for this number to be quite low. So what did you do to increase the number of keepers? You just shot more film. My belief right now, and a big part of what I’m chasing, is that, if you want to learn how to draw intuitively, the same principle applies. Do not expect your first drawing to be good. Or your second, or third. This requires you to really love the process of drawing - because otherwise, why would you even do this to yourself? The trick is to so enjoy the act of drawing that you really do look forward to doing it all the time.

For me, that has meant getting rid of a lot of laborious and perfectionistic techniques and tendencies, and though I’m still journeying down this path, I can confirm that I’m having a lot more fun.

I want to be clear here and note that the drawings above are some of my “keepers”, and don’t reflect the level I always draw at, which can at times be much worse – but that’s my point! When you focus on drawing a lot rather than drawing perfectly, you will inevitably end up with some spontaneous drawings that you do like, and these drawings will be surprising and delightful in unexpected ways.

A New Way of Thinking

Line has its own language.

I’m more used to thinking in mass or tone. Most of my graphite drawings depend almost entirely on large swaths of graphic tone to achieve the kind of design I aim for. But with nothing but line to work with, you’re encouraged to solve problems creatively in new ways:

• How do you draw a tree without defining every leaf?

• How do you create light and shadow without relying on mass?

• How do you suggest structure without overstating it?

It’s not a practice that’s an end in itself for me (though it could be!). What I love is the simplicity of it: just a single pen, a small sketchbook, and the ability to draw anywhere. So far, this has been the most direct and instantly accessible engagement with artmaking I’ve experienced. It isn’t my only practice, or even my main one, but I’ve already got the sense I’ll be doing it a long time, as it teaches me so many things I can take back into my painting and drawing when it’s not “direct.”

It’s Not That Scary

Here’s the cool thing-I’m only about a fourth of the way through my first “direct drawing” sketchbook, and I’m starting to forget that I can’t erase. I’m just solving problems differently. I’m also accepting the rough parts as par for the course.

And honestly, in the age of AI, who cares about perfection in drawing anyway?

I’d wager that in the future, a wobbly line will come at a premium.

👋 Until Next Time

Let me know-have you tried drawing directly with ink? What was the hardest part? What surprised you?

Do hit reply, I’d love to hear from you.

Until next month!🐊

Kevin

Just a quick check-in to share some recent creative sparks and what’s been happening in the studio and in life.

Downshifting to Deeper Personal Focus (Art)

Time for creative work outside of my day-to-day responsibilities has been limited lately, but that constraint has actually necessitated focus. With everything going on (Springboard’s job guarantee program, learning new digital tools, and prepping for an upcoming internship), I’ve had to get serious about what really matters to me in art in order to stay consistent.

In classic ADHD fashion, I’ve gone through at least 3000 iterations of a “Daily Drawing Schedule” since I set out to build on my drawing/designing skills in January. These have explored gesture, figure, fundamentals, composition, color, anatomy, narrative storytelling, drawing from imagination, shapes, line quality… you name it. But being pressed for time has forced clarity. What’s most important to me, I’ve realized, is surprisingly simple:

1. Enjoying my process: If I don’t look forward to it, I won’t return to it. But if I love it, I’ll repeat it often - and consistency leads to improvement. If there was one piece of advice I could give any beginning artist, it is this: Find a process you enjoy, and do it every day.

2. Staying aligned with the techniques and skills that support the kind of artist I’m becoming: I’ve noticed a shift in the kinds of qualities in an artwork that truly speak to me. For me, this means I value drawing with presence, with sensitivity, and with a sense of atmosphere, not necessarily technical prowess.

There’s been a quiet but steady shift in my heart when it comes to art. Where I once focused heavily on highly rendered realism, I now feel drawn to something more poetic. Works that are more liminal, more open, more emotional. Not every line needs to explain. Some can just hold a feeling.

Right now, that means centering my practice around two main anchors: observational drawing from life (often in pen) and gesture drawing focused on expressive form and energy. Both are compact, sustainable, and allow me to keep showing up without burning out.

Zooming out, I’ve also gotten clearer on the kind of work I want to build toward: quiet, mood-rich drawings of people in space- “figures in air.” The kind of art that lives somewhere between story and stillness. Influences like Eyvind Earle, Edward Hopper, Winslow Homer, and Cyril Pedrosa continue to light that path - artists who create space not just for a subject, but for a feeling.

In other words: drawing with intention, but without pressure. This season is reminding me that less can be more. If it’s honest, if it’s true.

Career Transition Efforts (news about the Day Job)

I’ve been offered a Product Design Internship with PAPER, the company I’ve been tutoring and essay reviewing with for 3.5 years. The internship will be short and sweet (10 weeks), but I’m excited to gain the experience - and finally to be on the other end of the software platform, which I know the ins and outs of like the back of my hand as a teacher and tutor. I’ll be involved in helping to design some ridiculously cute avatars, badges, and a dashboard for our kids’ new GROW program. I’m really excited for this, but these burblings in my career-life feel like a signaling that things are about to get quite busy! (Hence, the above stuff).

I’m in final round interviews with a startup for an equity-based position with an AI-powered music learning platform that is currently un-funded, but may lead to opportunity down the road. The platform utilizes AI to enhance real-life student-teacher relationships and practice sessions. Pretty excited about this one as it relates so closely to my background and current experience, but we’ll soon see!

📚 Currently Inspired By

• Reading: The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy
  

• Listening: 08/16/2024 (Secret Set), Mondegreen - The Woodlands, Dover, DE by Phish
  (I fell back in love with my favorite childhood band recently and have been experiencing a crazy little thing called joy in my music listening, maybe for the first time in many years). Phish is not for everyone, but they changed my life at 15, and again at 45. I don’t think any other band will ever mean as much to me.
  

• Looking: The artwork of @boingbl on Instagram, as well as the gouache and watercolor painting demos by James Gurney on YouTube.

Thanks for following along. Feel free to reply with your thoughts or just to say hi. More to come soon!

Kevin

Lately, I’ve been thinking about courage. Not in a grand or heroic sense, but in the quieter ways it shows up in a creative life.

I came across the work of Antoine Cossé not long ago, and it’s stayed with me. His comics and illustrations are sparse and moody. His drawings are loose. His use of color is minimal. At first glance, they might even seem unfinished. But look longer, and they open up. They are rhythmic, suggestive, full of atmosphere and restraint. He uses comics the way others might use poetry or jazz: for suggestion, for rhythm, for evocation.

It’s artwork that is quiet and unassuming, but that takes hold somewhere in your subconscious. It seems to say, “Rather than impress you with my skill, I’m going to maximize expression with the most minimal means, and let that be enough.”

While a single image by Cossé can be arresting (see the New Yorker illustration below), it’s the totality of his visual world– his shape language, cinematic design sense, and understated knowledge of the human figure– that make him such a standout artist, in my opinion. Only one person in the world could have created a drawing by Cossé: and that’s Cossé.

It couldn’t have been easy to forge the path he did. Unlike more utilitarian approaches to drawing or painting, there is no formula for this, and no guaranteed result. Rather than chase “perfection,” he’s built a visual language out of what most artists are taught to avoid: looseness, ambiguity, sketchiness.

This suggests a deep internal shift- from trying to impress others, to trusting that your sensibility is enough. That takes time. And it takes courage: a characteristic I feel we would do well to remember in our assessments of artists and their work.

Not everyone will respond to work like Cossé’s. One reviewer, for instance, described Metax as “too conceptual,” with art that was “muddy and hard to follow,” and characters who blurred together in a story that didn’t land. And that’s fair. Another reviewer went so fair to say that “the story was boring and the art wasn’t even really good.” Not every eye will see the same thing. Not every viewer will connect with the same rhythm.

This is something I’m still learning to sit with.

For a long time, I’ve worked in a mode that feels relatively safe: careful graphite portraits, tightly rendered drawings. They’re the kind of work that people tend to respond to quickly and positively. There’s a visible skill there that’s easy to recognize. But lately I’ve found myself wanting something else- wanting to loosen, to experiment, to risk making things that don’t immediately “land.”

That shift is uncomfortable. And it’s slow. And my work kind of sucks right now. But I think it’s important.

What artists like Cossé remind me of is that developing your own voice often means stepping off the well-trodden path. You may not have a formula. You may not always be understood. But you keep showing up anyway, letting the work teach you as you go.

And the hope is that the audience that’s meant to find you will recognize something real in what you’re doing. Not because it’s perfect, but because it’s true.

Shifting Gears

This idea of courage of trusting your own sensibility has been reshaping how I work.

Most mornings begin with loose figure gestures- 15 to 30 minutes just to move the hand and eye in rhythm. These warm-ups are quick, fluid, and unprecious. I’m trying to feel the motion more than construct it. It’s a way of shaking off the stiffness, of practicing responsiveness over control.

From there, I’ve been spending more time on observational drawing- often going straight in with pen, focused on line. No erasing, no scaffolding, no rendering. Just looking and responding. It keeps me present and honest, even when things get awkward or off. There’s something valuable in that directness.

I’ve also started making small composition studies to stretch my narrative thinking. Simple thumbnails where I explore space, mood, and shape relationships- asking what makes an image feel like a moment, not just a rendering.

New this week: watercolor. Just quick washes and color notes added over drawings. I don’t really know what I’m doing yet, but that’s part of the point. It’s a way to stay in motion, to add tone and atmosphere without overthinking. Color is still new territory, but I’m trying to approach it the same way I’ve been learning to draw—freely, without too much pressure.

None of this is about creating finished pieces. It’s about showing up with honesty. Some drawings feel clumsy. Some feel like doors. Either way, I’m trying to keep going with my eyes open.

I’m not making a lot of finished work at the moment, so the most I can offer to show you are the sketches and doodles like the ones above. However, I’m really proud of these in the sense that I know they are just small bits and pieces currently boiling together in the stew that I’m cooking up in the background while I am opening myself up to new things in service of finding my authentic path. I’m truly, truly enjoying this journey, which is teaching me so much about myself, where I’ve come from, and who I really am when no one is watching.

An Offering

If you’re in a place of transition or doubt- or just feeling unsure about what your art “should” be- consider this:

What would it look like to make work from a place of trust, not performance?

What would happen if you loosened your grip?

Maybe courage is less about pushing hard, and more about letting go. In what ways have you had to reinvent yourself or your art practice? Have you ever switched mediums entirely? What does it mean to you to trust your own instinct, over any outside or societal pressures? Drop me a note or leave a comment because I’d love to talk about it.

Housekeeping: A Slower Rhythm

One last thing! You might’ve noticed this letter arrives less often than before. That’s intentional.

I’m a slow processor. My ideas often need time to marinate, shift, contradict themselves, and settle again. I’m learning to embrace this about myself, that I do a lot thinking and processing before I feel ready to say anything, and want to respect both myself and you by providing a bit more time to sift before I speak, as well as take a bit of pressure off myself to crank out newsletters bi-weekly.

So this newsletter will now follow a monthly rhythm.

Easier for me to maintain. Slower, but more honest. When I write, I want to be sure I mean it. And when you read it, I hope it feels like something worth sitting with.

Thanks for being here. See you next month! 🐊

Kevin Scott Davis

I’m back with another short update—this time with a mix of art, conversation, and music.

First, here’s an older portrait from 2022 I made of Shannon. I’ve been reflecting on past work lately, seeing how my approach to drawing has shifted over time. There’s something satisfying about revisiting these earlier pieces— often, there’s a lightness and freedom to our earlier work that that is hard to retrieve once the gaps in our knowledge become more filled in.

A work of art, once it’s out in the world for awhile, was made by a different person than you were before. Know what I mean? To astounding affect, at times. The same is true for music. I often feel wholly separate from the person who made my early music, to the point of being baffled as to how I even made it. This speaks to my belief that we are makers, but also participants in reflecting something which comes from a source greater than ourselves.

When was the last time you had a dream filled with buildings, landscapes, people, or concepts that you could never intentionally produce in waking life?

As such, we are like prisms, bending light. Reforming source material made up of the million impressions, experiences, and inspirations that pass through us—some consciously chosen, others absorbed unknowingly. Art, in this way, feels less like pure invention and more like an act of translation, a revealing of something already present but previously unseen.

Perhaps that’s where knowledge comes in—not as a means of controlling or originating, but as a way of organizing this raw, ever-flowing material. It gives us tools to more effectively shape, refine, and mold something meaningful from the chaos with intention. This ends up reflecting our own unique take on what it means to be human. And this is why there will never be one too many artists. The world will never again have access to your singular, prismatic reflection apart from you.

A Conversation on Art & Meaning

Recently, I had the pleasure of returning to speak with Gabriela Handal on her video podcast. We dug into some big questions about art—intent versus craft, conceptual versus visual art, and the ways we define “good” art. I always enjoy chatting with Gabriela, someone whose artistic work and boundless curiosity I truly admire. It was a rich discussion, and if these topics interest you, I’d love for you to check it out.

🎧 Watch the interview here:

Inspiration Lately: Folk & Country Tones

Lately, I’ve been drawn to the raw honesty of folk and country music—stories woven through simple, beautifully played songs. These albums have been on repeat:

🎵 Woodland – Gillian Welch & David Rawlings
- In my humble opinion, Gillian Welch is one of the best living songwriters, and this new album is a bit of a departure from previous work, with it’s Fleetwood Mac influences and Rawlings’ shared songwriting stylings, but it’s a grower that gets more brilliant with each successive listen. Be sure not to miss the final track, my personal favorite.

🎵 Good & Green Again – Jake Xerxes Fussell
- Low country music for hipsters. But with a lot more depth to the musicianship than that, incorporating strains of rag, country, and folk all done so deliciously on my own instrument of choice: a clean, tone-dialed Telecaster. But Jake’s presence and voice is really what makes this album special.

🎵 Keep Me on Your Mind/See You Free – Bonnie Light Horseman
- Brand new band to me, also in a folk/country vein, but with excellent, creative songwriting and chemistry, just heaps of chemistry. Don’t miss “Singing to the Mandolin” and “When I Was Younger.”

If you’re in the mood for something warm, a little wistful, and rich with storytelling, these might be worth a listen.

As always, thanks for being here. If you check out the podcast or give any of these albums a spin, let me know what you think!

Until next time,

Kevin 🐊

How are you all this fine Thursday? Is it just me, or are we getting a taste of the springtime coming? February can just about go crawl into the dark, dank hole from which it came. Yes, I hear a chickadee. 🐣🍦

As both an experiment in the efficacy of brevity and a personal reprieve from hefty workloads of late, today I’m keeping things short and sweet (this particular sentence notwithstanding). A bit of art, a bit of inspiration. Thanks for your support and I hope you all have a wonderful weekend.

What I’ve Been Doing Lately

In my art practice, I’m concentrated lately on learning new things, drawing in new ways, absorbing new philosophies, and re-examining my artistic identity. In UX, this we call this the “divergence” phase of a project - that is going wide, opening up to exploration, and gathering in as much unfiltered research as possible so as to gain a broad view of contexts. Being a sponge, basically. This comes, of course, before the “convergence” phase, where you can imagine that the sides of a parabola narrows toward the vertex (just learned that word, thanks) - which is to say the point of transition, or where the two sides meet as the scope decreases.

This is actually pretty scary to do when you already have a process that works, because in a lot of ways it feels like regression.

For example, I discovered that I’ve been anchoring my hand to the surface of my table like an ogre all my life when performing any type of writing or drafting tasks. This leads to movement limited to the wrist, which is fine for writing, but leads to short, scratchy lines in drawing. In academic drawing on a vertical surface, this wasn’t as much a problem, though I did have to train myself to hold the pencil loosely while anchoring my hand with a pinky (it’s as awkward looking as it sounds, but works).

Now that I’m back to drawing on tables and boards, I’m retraining myself once again to use my whole arm to draw, allowing for a much broader range of movement, and therefore longer, flowing lines. After a lifetime of engrained bad drawing habits, it can feel a lot like suddenly switching to your non-dominant hand to write. And the results will look regressed. As such, I’m not making a lot of finished, focused work at the moment, but rather a whole lot of sketching, studying, and adding up the mileage (just doing, not overthinking) needed to improve my hand-to-brain motor skills.

Of course, there is no wrong way to draw. I am a big believer in daily practice over technique, classes, or quick tips. But this is part of sorting through the divergence phase, for me. I’m taking a survey of what’s possible, what I can improve, and what I can add to my tool belt. More on this stuff in future newsletters. ✏️

On the Nightstand 📚

Just finished: A Gentleman in Moscow - Amor Towles ⭑⭑⭑⭑

Such a whimsical novel that is really a celebration of life and the power of acceptance in making the most of where you’re at. It has a tone I would liken to the film ‘Amelie’, somewhat, occupying that space that is somehow both humorous, sad, and deeply beautiful at the same time. Really quite singular and lives up to the hype. Excited to read more from this author.

Currently reading: James - Percival Everett

+ Heartbreak Soup (Comics Omnibus): Gilbert Hernandez

+ Gesture Drawing: Dynamic Movement & Form - Michael Hampton

Until next time! Thanks for reading. 🤓 - K

Are you getting used to me showing up in your inbox yet? 👹

It still feels a bit audacious. The world is at our fingertips, competing for every spare shred of attention, so the fact that you willingly subscribe and spend time with my thoughts is not lost on me—I truly appreciate it. 🫶

For this newsletter, I wanted to do two things:

1: Share a little progress report on my self-taught drawing journey.

2: Provide a brief recap of where I’m at professionally + some thoughts on doing what you love vs. what you think someone else will love vs. what is loving.

If you’re only interested in the first, just check out the pictures ;)

Otherwise, I hope you find something here useful, inspiring, or empathetic.

In 2024, I spent ten months in an intensive UX/UI Bootcamp through Springboard, all while working as an online tutor for PAPER, an EdTech company that’s been in deep turmoil since 2021. Springboard promised that eligible students—those with a Bachelor’s degree and a few other qualifications—would land a job within six months of graduation or receive a tuition refund. Historically, this job guarantee was a low-risk gamble for them, as only 40% of students graduate on time, and back-end data showed that only 2% of students ever received a refund, likely because they either got hired or didn’t make it through the program.

That calculation has changed. The tech job market for Junior Designers and Developers has tanked to the point that Springboard has now eliminated its job guarantee for future students and doubled the time frame and job search requirements for those still eligible, out from under them—citing “a natural disaster or other occurrence.”

As part of my own agreement, I apply to at least 10 jobs per week, reach out to 10 new contacts, complete 4 informational interviews per month, and document 2 provable skill development activities, all while meeting bi-weekly with a Springboard-contracted career coach (who, thankfully, is great). These requirements continue for a full year without pause. Failing to meet them for any reason results in a strike, and three strikes means losing my chance at a tuition refund. Needless to say, Springboard is doubtlessly aware of the position we are both in.

At 154 applications in and not a single interview so far, I can honestly say I’m not feeling confident about landing a UX job anytime soon. When industry professionals you interview as part of your program’s requirements suggest removing the fact that you’re a bootcamp graduate from your resumé, you know things aren’t looking great. In uncertain financial times, companies just don’t want to take a gamble on hiring juniors when there are plenty of seasoned designers to choose from in what is currently an employer’s market. I get it. That said, I knew this would be challenging, and I’m no stranger to competitive fields. In the meantime, I’m doing all I can to become the best designer possible while treating the job search as a long game—after all, if I succeed, I know it will be because of my own efforts, not necessarily the school I attended. Can we say “gumption?” All together now. G-U-M-P-T-I-O-N!! 👏🍤

That said, I’m not one to sit around and wait for a job to land in my lap. With the future uncertain and having already invested in something “practical,” I’ve decided to use a portion of my time in job hunt purgatory to lean into skills that I’m naturally passionate about. As I’ve said before, in 2025 I’m attempting to take my drawing skills to the next level. Illustration is design-adjacent, sure, but it’s also something I truly enjoy—something that gives me a sense of creative autonomy. And I’m documenting that journey here (which also hopefully boosts my marketable writing skills ).

I wanted to share my honest personal experience, because I know many of you are trying to find a way to stay afloat in our economy as well. It might look like every other person on Instagram is somehow wildly successful as a creative, but most of us making art are not making a living from art. The illustration field is arguably in decline, graphic designers are jumping ship, the term “fine artist” is functionally synonymous for “art teacher” or “content creator”, and concept artists are losing their jobs to AI. And let me just circle back around to teachers here, who make an average of $17.79 per hour in the state of Georgia where I live, not far off the national poverty line, depending on household. This is not to mention associated gun violence, which puts schoolteachers (and part time artists who once could teach on the side for a reliable income) at risk on a daily basis for a paycheck. Earned while shepherding our children. Selah.

We are living in the ruins of a dead American dream. Billionaires rule the government now, and big tech companies rule the seas of free capital. The rest of us are down here doing our best, but we aren’t without fault, either. Our addictions, largesse, and constant appetite for entertainment and distraction are a perfect feedback loop for the companies that want to provide those things to us at a profit.

So I’ve been thinking once again about falling into the trap of molding your skills, work, and even persona, into what you think someone might want, rather than doing what you know you would be best at. When you feel like you’ve been doing everything life tells you you should do, and that doesn’t work out– what then?

The obvious answer, at least by today’s standards, is to follow your dream. Jim Carrey famously said, “You can fail at what you don’t want, so you might as well take a chance on doing what you love.” It’s an appealing idea. If the corporate world doesn’t pan out, why not pour everything into art, music, writing—whatever lights the fire in your bones? Why not reject the rat race and build a career out of the thing you love most?

But that’s not necessarily the answer either. The hard reality is that, in a society where wealth disparity is so unbalanced, dreams are not always financially viable. That doesn’t mean they aren’t worthwhile. But the idea that your deepest passion must also be your means of survival is a modern, Western construct, and one that can leave people disillusioned when their creative work fails to sustain them. Some dreams make great jobs. Others don’t. And that’s okay. Not everything we love has to be monetized to have value.

But here’s the thing, the kicker. There’s a third way.

The other morning, I came across a familiar reference to Christ as a carpenter’s son in Matthew 13. I’ve always known this generally, and pictured it as something kind of cool– like teen Jesus creating hardy yet elegant Galilean furniture, beads of sweat flung from his tanned olive forehead while chiseling and planing through beams of cedar with divine precision. But I GPT’ed the Greek word for “carpenter”(tekton) and found that its meaning isn’t limited to woodworking. In fact, wood was pretty scarce in the geographic region where Jesus would have worked. Upon cross-checking this, I saw that the word could also have meant a builder, stonemason, or general laborer - so basically the same thing as a modern-day construction worker. It struck me that the Son of God, who could have been anything, really spent most of His adult life as a blue-collar worker.

It made me realize how often I’m asking the wrong questions when it comes to careers and ambitions. We get caught between two competing ideas: should we do what we love, or should we do what we think others will love (and therefore pay for)? The Jim Carrey quote suggests the former. The world often pressures us toward the latter. But what if the most important thing isn’t doing what we love or even what others love, but doing what is loving?

The truth is that human machinations will always eventually fail. And I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but America is one of them. When powered only by our own strength, the hustle often just leads to burn out or even despair. Even when we succeed, if our work is only about ourselves—our survival, our ambitions, our sense of identity—it eventually feels hollow. But work that is grounded in love—love for others, love for God, love for truth, love for beauty and purity—is never wasted.

So maybe the question isn’t whether I land a UX job first or a more art-related one. Maybe the real question is: How can I make my work an act of love? How can I create something that serves? How can I invest my time in something that builds up rather than just builds wealth?

Thanks for reading. - K