Do you choose a word of the year? I’ve tried a few times. But somewhere around the end of January it falls out of focus. By spring, it’s forgotten entirely. But if I were to retrospectively choose a word for 2026, it would be, “pivot.”
I’m not a fan of spontaneity, to put it mildly. I like order. I love routine. I jot down notes before making phone calls. My planner never leaves my bag. So no, I will not randomly join you for hang-gliding and Margaritas on a Tuesday afternoon no matter how nicely you ask.
But this year has been full of pivots. Random roadblocks and unexpected detours have popped up routinely. It’s been a year of having to say, “This was what I planned, but this is what I have, so what am I going to do about it?” And that’s had an impact on my art, too.
My goal in 2026 was to be more intentional in creating portfolio pieces. The above is the rough sketch of the most recent illustration I worked on. There were some thumbnails before this and a handful of sketches to get the pose right, also. But by this stage, I’d hammered out the subject, the composition and done a color study, too. This image is the color study I was working on, but flipped to grayscale, to check values (I did the sketch in Photoshop). Values have been a consistent issue for me, so it’s an area I’m focusing on more as of late.
So the sketch is good to go, let’s get painting! Right? Well… I hit some speed bumps:
The second I stretched the paper something was off; a buckle in the corner felt like an omen. I was rushing, which never works for me when prepping.
I wanted to try out something different with the underpainting. But in retrospect, this is something I should have done with a small study, first, not a portfolio piece. Building confidence in a new direction would have really helped before jumping into something bigger.
I decided to go rogue and veer away from my color study. Sometimes this works. In this case, it most certainly did not.
And within a couple hours, this is where I ended up:
Meh. This felt flat in comparison to my sketches. The colors had gone wonky. I was convinced I’d wasted an entire morning. So I did what you should do at times like this — hid the art in a corner, ate a cookie and bitterly complained.
But the next day, I wasn’t quite willing to give up on the concept. So I went for a Hail Mary pass. I wanted to see if things were salvageable, so pivoted to drawing, instead of painting. If after an hour or two that wasn’t looking promising, I’d admit defeat and move on. But things started to coalesce.
This is graphite on Bristol board with a range of pencils (I love this for small details). Working in black and white always feels like a gamble. You have to trust the process enough to believe that when color is added, things will all come together. And the above image in this post was the end result after adding color in Photoshop.
Illustrations don’t always end this well — plenty ends up in the trash bin. But sometimes the pieces that have flopped the hardest have taught me the most. I had a drawing instructor frame it once as, “It’s just paper” (which while true, doesn’t take the sting out of hours down the drain). Sometimes art making is as much about the unfinished pieces as the finished, the zig zags versus the straight lines.
But the idea of spontaneous drinks and hang-gliding still sounds like torture.
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