daily-ish notes…

  • of sunrises.

    March, just hours away as I write this, is often a month of sunrises.

    Sure, there are sunrises all year long, but where I live the timing, angle, and moisture levels in the air make March a month of spectacularly beautiful sunrises at a convenient time of day.

    I used to take lots of sunrise (and sunset) photos. Cliché? Maybe.

    Tho, I’m hoping I can transfer that skill of capturing beautiful sunrises in pixels with a camera into an equitable skill with a brush, paint and paper. I’ve been watching videos and reading tutorials about blending colours and layering washes to create the types of hues and patterns that we often think of as a sunset.

    Now, hopefully March delivers me some inspiration.


  • about addendum b.

    Continuing on from yesterday’s note and the addendums to my About Me page, I thought it worth noting that in the last week or so I’ve branched out from purely watercolour painting notes and added a quiet little section where I’ve been trying to evoke my inner Asimov and write fiction on the daily.

    There is a little section called the story as noted hidden down in a menu somewhere and it’s become the place where I try each day — or have done for the last week or so — to write a bit of loosely connected science fiction-type words. I aim for a hundred-plus words per day, roughly drabble-length, but just brick by brick adding to a larger narrative. That narrative fiction may change over time, but at the moment it is a silly story about a dying planet Earth in the somewhat medium future and a guy named Noah aboard a transport spaceship full of barnyard animals.

    Not watercolour, but rather continuing to build my little digital creative studio space here.


  • about addendum a.

    I have a fairly vague and creatively idiosyncratic-bent About Me page on this site. Of course this would do little favour to a website that was actually hoping to lure in long-term repeat visitors and actually cared about things like audience retention or selling a product… which I don’t.

    I’ve thought about rewriting my About Me page, but instead I decided I’d just start leaving addendums here in my daily notes and maybe someday someone will care enough to scroll through these far enough to find out more about what’s going on here on notesforasketch.ca.

    See, I started this site because I was listening to a podcast and the interviewee of some particular episode kept mentioning about his work and how he would often carry around a book and make “notes for a sketch of” blah blah blah so that he could go back later and draw from memory. At the time I was thinking a lot about my various creative pursuits, and the work I was doing in learning watercolour and how some of the stuff I’d written so far was leaning towards the “advice-zone” — and not in a good way, towards advice that as a learner I really had no business handing out. I just wanted to keep track of things for my own business-of-learning needs, so really what I needed was a lot of little notes for that one sketch that I’d made written in a casual sort of manner and being reflective on my process and the sorts of thoughts I was thinking when I painted said image.

    Idea: conceived.

    Of course, in the intervening months this has not only started to swirl into more of a solid vision, but I’ve found I can use this site to leave more than art notes, but blobs of fiction and of course these daily missives, so the whole site is really starting to become something more of a digital creative studio space for me, and I like where it’s going.


  • reminding me that life is short.

    I ran into a friend in the grocery store today as I was rushing around on my lunch break, running errands, restocking my coffee, living a hectic life between meetings.

    She was wandering. Shopping. Waiting for news from her doctor. I probably don’t need to mention there was a good chance it would be bad news.

    Life is short.

    Life is too short to overthink.

    Life is too short to hesitate to say and do the things you want to do.

    Life is too short to second guess yourself.

    Life is too short to stuff your soul in a box and wait for permission to let it out.

    Short. Too short.


  • are brand you.

    Your personal brand is a culmination of everything you put out into the world under the banner of your name. It’s not a logo or a style or a website or a social media follower count. Or rather, it’s not just any one of those things, but all of them mushed together into the perception of someone who stumbles upon you and catches a glimpse of the piece that happens to zoom by as you pass through time and space and the universe. Imagine yourself as a stranger who opens a single page of your website, sees a single painting, reads a single paragraph of your writing or scrolls by a single post. Just one of those things. Not all. Not a cross-section. Not even the one you choose for them to experience. Randomly just one piece of creative output that you have shared with the universe. That’s how you will be experienced and understood by that person, through a single image, sentence, or dabble of paint on a page.

    Does it say everything you want it to say? Does it say anything about you at all? If you put your true self into it, and create for the right reason, there’s no reason it would not be anything but what you want it to be.