Hey there, how's it going?
Finally a new year, so I wanted to catch up with you again.

I wanted to share with you a lesson I learned from last year - and also share a short list of some of the most valuable content I created last year.

One thing I’ve probably learned the most from painting from life, especially outdoors, is the importance of making decisions. When doing plein air painting or travel sketching on location, there’s no time to waste - especially in the morning or evening light.

I started painting while in my second year of college during a Color & Composition class. We had an assignment where we had to create multiple pieces with each one being done in a different medium.

Watercolors are one of the most challenging painting mediums out there - Unforgiving and mysterious. Feared by many, including myself. Then one day I finally decided to take them more seriously and try to harness their powers. It all started a year ago.

I painted this watercolor from a photograph that I took on a trip to Alaska in early May. This particular scene is of some mountains near the Denali Park Entrance.

So I made it back from Alaska in one piece, which isn’t too surprising. Although there was one part of the trip where things got a bit sketchy, but overall it wasn’t too bad. I had an amazing time and saw so many beautiful things.

After many years of wanting to visit Alaska, I finally planned a trip lasting 10-days across several different towns - Anchorage, Denali, Girdwood and Seward being the bulk of the trip. I’ve decided to go with watercolors and sketches for this trip and minimized my materials for ease of use when traveling.

I've always thought, 'what's the point of using and lugging around 10+ tubes of color when I can just use a limited palette and mix my own colors from just 3-5 main colors?'. And for the last 5-6 years of my painting career, I have relied heavily on a limited palette of red, yellow & blue to create 95% of my paintings. But things are changing - and I have decided to explore color more deeply in the hopes of creating paintings with stronger color moving forward.

I've had many artists over the last few years of my time on YouTube contact me with questions and concerns regarding fear and painting. Most of them were fearful to even begin a painting at all. They would tell me that the blank canvas was intimidating and they were afraid of not creating a great painting, so instead of giving it a go - they never started. This type of fear and level of perfectionism can be quite damaging to your art career or journey. I'd like to give you a few tips to help you overcome this fear so you can start creating and progressing with your art.

Since September 2013, I have been living in a 420 square-foot apartment [with a loft] with my girlfriend. As you can imagine, this has been quite challenging for me to create paintings, store all my materials in roughly a 7x7 foot corner of the living space, and still not encroach upon my girlfriend's space or the rest of the living area. And if that isn't bad enough,

For the past few years now I've been selling small paintings on Etsy and shipping them out myself and I've had to figure out the best way to pack them safely so they don't arrive damaged in any way. I use the USPS free flat rate boxes - usually the Medium size - as these allow for extra room around the painting for padding, in case the box gets stepped on or dropped the painting won't be touched.

I spent two full days in the Laguna Beach area recently to visit with family and I was also able to visit the Irvine Museum as well as the Laguna Art Museum and do some exploring around Heisler Park in Laguna Beach. Spending a good part of one day at the beach, I was able to explore the details of the shore and study the nuances of the ocean, waves and reflections as the day went on. My appreciation for the ocean and rocky shores grew very much on this trip as well as inspiration and ideas for future paintings.

After I wrote a recent post about Varnishing Oil Paintings with Gamblin Gamvar, I received some questions regarding how to varnish acrylic paintings. I don't really work with acrylics anymore but I do have some acrylic paintings laying around from a few years ago. So, I decided to experiment with a small painting - my first still life painted from life. On Gamblin's site it states that Gamvar can be used on oil and acrylic paintings and that Gamvar can be easily removed with Gamsol in the future when needed.

In the last few days I've been varnishing all of the paintings I've done in the last one and half years since I began using oil paints. Most of the paintings are small in size, 6x8s or 5x7s but I also have some 12x16s - and just recently within the past month or two I've begun painting larger - 18x24, 20x20, and 24x36. But I started out only varnishing the smaller paintings because I wasn't sure how to go about it.. and the reason is because if you search "varnishing oil paintings" online, you will come across so many different explanations and solutions and problems that you will cry and never want to ever varnish your paintings. But since I don't want you to cry, I will share with you my process of varnishing my oil paintings with Gamblin's Gamvar.