Created in 2005. Looking back on this in the same month in 2022.

When we relocated to Turkey I threw all my physical photos away, but not before scanning them all to preserve a digital version. I’m so glad I went through that process, because it’s fun to look back on my creative journey and see how I used to paint and the subjects I favoured.

One of my forays was into a series of sketches featuring figures in action, where their heads were abstracted with related objects. I think this was because I didn’t want to draw faces, and this was the ideal way around the dilemma or realism.

My favourite hat person I created was “The Painter”. The textured Photoshopped version is the featured image above, and here’s the original watercolour (with the colours boosted via Photoshop).

Here’s a gallery of some of my other favourites

As you can see, my original watercolours were bland and insipid. They lacked depth and vibrance, so I corrected some of them using Photoshop. I was doing an online course at Santa Monica College at the time, and lots of my art went through the manipulation phase. You’ll also see the clues that I was slightly obsessed with learning to juggle at the time.

I was shortly after this Hat People series that I gave up on watercolour. Even though I’d attended a weekly watercolour class, I hadn’t mastered the skills I need to create interesting paintings. I liked the subjects I was creating, just not the way my watercolours looked. I didn’t realise about layering, and all I needed to do was to work on each piece more to add more detail and depth.

It’s been so good to look back on this series. Not just at the weird and wacky people I depicted but at how far my watercolour skills have developed. It was also a surprise to see that I sketched in pencil – I hadn’t discovered my love of sketching in ink yet.