Welcome to another art studio monthly recap!

This month I revisited what I call 'Watercolors' but are better described as poured colored inks. I made a series of cats or mountain lions using these colored inks.

What I am working on right now in painting is painting memories. The idea of 'Memory' in both the world and through media or art that I have seen. While looking through Facebook, some of the memories that the app decided to show me were mostly pictures of art, or video game moments that I posted, or things that I thought were funny. This made me realize more deeply that most of anyone's real memories can never be documented by a computer or a photograph. They should be painted instead.

Working through some memories, I decided to paint Clippy, the Microsoft Word helper mascot. It turned out Clippy had a lot more going on than I thought. The gentle red line of the notepaper that he hovers on, to the delicate shadow behind him.

Similar to Clippy, I also made some progress on my painting, "Blurry Mr. Krabs"

Of all the things I could paint, why do I waste time painting silly memes? I guess in the case of Mr. Krabs, I can identify with this meme, because the world confuses me most of the time. While painting this meme, I realized just how mad everyone looks as they are surrounding Mr. Krabs! It feels like everyone in the world is angry at Mr. Krabs, and that they are closing in on him soon. This is a feeling that I think most people can resonate with at one point or another, which is why it's a meme to begin with, and why I painted it.

Earlier in May, I finished up my self-portrait in oil on panel:

Boy I love painting on panel. Canvas is definitely a romantic carryover material that is far inferior to panel. If artists of old could have always painted on a smooth panel, they would have done so, 100 percent of the time. The whole process of priming a canvas is mostly to smooth over the stitched indentations of a canvas. Why paint on something that has tons of little bumps all over it anyways? Ugh. Panel ftw. I wish I had art panels as big as the moon.

In other news, my Leadville-related works are still available via harper-rose.com . If you happen to be a lucky person who can visit Leadville, Colorado, you can't miss HarperRose Studios, it is at one of the two stoplights in town, on the historic Harrison Avenue!

I'll also be returning to Leadville this June for some plein air painting. It will be a good time to follow me on Instagram if you aren't already, to keep up with some lovely nature-based images as well as paintings!

How is Tilted Sun going? It's good! I'm working on writing part 2 at this point, which is super exciting. Here is some sneak peek artwork that released this month:

See you soon, Space Cowboys!