I hereby dub the month of February as “Flat February”! Every painting I do in the month of February will be painted only with flat brushes. They’re my least favorite brush type as I feel I have the least amount of fine detail control with them so what better way to improve then to dedicate the next 28 days to using nothing but flats! What could possibly go wrong?! *cries silently*

I just finished the last painting for the month of January and overall this has been an interesting start to this year-long project.

Overall I feel like I’m still being too “safe” and sticking with subject matter that I’m more comfortable with. As the year progresses I’d like to get further away from my comfort zone and experiment more not only with different painting styles and mediums but with subject matter that I find especially difficult such as the human figure.

Each time I work on a new painting I like to think of little challenges in order to keep pushing myself. Sometimes the challenge is to use a large(ish) flat brush (my least favorite kind because it feels hard for me to control) or sometimes the challenge is to push the color saturation further than I think it needs to (I tend to want to desaturate colors or be too “truthful” to the photo reference). As one of the main reasons I’m doing this project is to continually push myself out of my comfort zone I think these challenges are important to not end the year in the same place I started.