Watercolor Painting for Presidents' Day

Now that I look at it, the shadow looks more like blood. As though I'm suggesting the country is bleeding…

One of my reasons for doing this quick-ish paintings is that I tend to overthink…EVERYTHING!

It’s the reason that I can’t sleep. It’s the reason why I’m still learning how to draw at age 50. It’s the reason I’ve produced so little work. I suffer from analysis paralysis. And perfectionism.

By telling myself that I’m going to design and execute a painted piece for a specific day forces me to toss the perfectionism and lack of complete knowledge away and to just make the damn thing.

To that end, I made the above piece for Presidents' Day.

BUT…it's not what I originally wanted to do. Here's the sketch of what I really wanted to do:

Original idea for watercolor cartoon for Presidents' Day, dated 2/2/20

It covered several of the creation bases that I want to cover: cartoon drawing, single panel idea creation and painting.

This idea was unusual. It came fully formed late on the night of February 2nd and the biggest question was which President I was going to use for "Good." I settled on Jimmy Carter.

But I quickly ran into some obstacles. I've never been good at caricature. It takes a lot of sketches for me to get to a likeness. I didn't spend enough time on the sketches, searching for the best likeness.

I started my sketches of Carter. They began poorly and improved but at the rate it was taking me to find the likeness, I wouldn't get it done in time for the holiday. Not only did I need to draw this whole thing but paint it, too.

First attempts at Jimmy Carter caricatures

Second attempts at Jimmy Carter caricatures

Third attempts at Jimmy Carter caricatures

So I needed a new, much easier idea.

A Google search of "Presidents' Day" provided all of the cliché images. But that's what I needed, something I could do easily that communicated the subject clearly.

I settled on the hat at top.

Just getting paint onto paper in the right place is a challenge. As I said in the painting's caption, the shadow is looking more like blood which wasn't my intention. I'll have to get better with doing shadows. I'm just satisfied that I did something.

There will be more watercolor paintings and a how-to coming soon.

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