Out of the Woods

Happy new yay! (That's a persistent Otto Correct that I've decided can definitely stay!) May your 2025 be full of sparkly yays and gentle blessings, light, laughter and love.

Out of the Woods
(Intense blocks and pencils on watercolour paper, from a photo by a friend in the UK)

Starting the year with something a little different. Like so many things, photography increasingly shifted from being a real, tangible medium to something that is primarily created on a screen. (And I don't even want to go into my feelings on integrated generative AI permeating the creative world!) In shifting my creative work further away from digital again, I've rediscovered painting and drawing, something that got left behind after high school when I was drawn into the marvels of computer graphics back in the early nineties. I was enchanted by the vibrant colours of Inktense when I bought mine about a decade ago, but it's only in recent months that I've started discovering their full potential. Inktense is a dry pigmented ink that that becomes activated and permanent with water. They come in pencils and blocks and can be used dry like pencils or pastel, or diluted and mixed similar to watercolours, or wet and applied directly and thickly. I'm absolutely loving the process of mixing and playing with real media again. Although there are times I do miss digital's "undo" and the possibility of non-destructive experimenting, and as much as I enjoyed the power and seemingly infinite possibility of digital, I'm experiencing infinitely more joy in once again working with real, messy, stuff!

May you also find joy in simple, real, things and also find you'e able to make the time to enjoy them!