Accepting the Challenge
Oof! Artist’s block or just laziness? I don’t know, but I have done nothing in the past few months except for a couple of quick pencil sketches. I searched around online for ideas to get going again, but nothing really sparked me. Until I discovered the #Washtober2020 watercolour challenge.
I keep up with a couple of watercolour-related Youtube channels. One day, a video got me picking up my paintbrushes again to do original work. Liron Yanconsky took the established Inktober initiative and suggested a version for watercolourists. He published a list of topics, one for each day of October. It was already a couple of days in when I discovered the Washtober2020 challenge. I haven’t done one a day and I’m also a couple of days behind, but I’ve found it a breath of fresh air. It’s got me painting subjects I wouldn’t have thought of, or just a new approach to familiar topics. Hover the cursor over each picture to see the topic name.
Perhaps I should explain the cyclist, for those of you not into pro-cycling! I did this painting, which depicts “persistance”, during the Giro d’Italia grand tour race. Slovakian and three-times world champion Peter Sagan hadn’t won at all in 2020, and had finished second on three stages of the Giro (, and then he finally won stage 10. The Giro and the Vuelta d’Espana are the two other three-week “grand tours” alongside the Tour de France – so it’s a big deal. That’s persistance! I sometimes doodle cyclists on paper or on my iPad while I’m watching races, so I have a good idea of the stances they take, though I did this mostly from a photo.
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