This was the drawing that nearly done me in. Day 1 started off horribly. It was almost as if I had forgotten how to sketch anything at all. Nothing seemed to work out, and I was ready to throw in the towel and start something new the next day.

But, I dug my heels in and moved onto Day 2. It was slightly better, but everything was just off. I was having trouble with the angles and perspective. However, I had something I could at least work with. Something I could fix.

I continued sketching into Day 3 and finally got something I was happy with. I inked it and colored for the remaining six days.

I once again pulled a template from The Master Guide to Drawing Anime: How to Draw Original Characters from Simple Templates. The book is still not particularly helpful in technique, but it does have plenty of source material to practice with.

The following is a reverse-chronological gallery of all nine days of work on this drawing:

The tools I used were:

• Strathmore 300 Series Bristol Vellum Pad, 9”x12”.
• Ticonderoga HB (#2) pencils.
• Prismacolor Premier coloring pencils.
• Tachikawa Comic Pen Nib Holder.
• Zebra Comic G Model Chrome Pen Nib.
• Deleter Manga Ink, Black 4.
• Prismacolor Premier illustration markers.
• Tombow Mono Zero Eraser.
• Mr. Pen Erasers.

Overall, I am happy with the end result. I wish I would’ve added in more background scenery, but I was already behind just getting out of the gates on this one. I’m glad I stuck this one out.

As I was doing my weekly grocery and household shopping, I wandered over to the arts and crafts isle in Walmart. It is part of my routine. I look around, mostly “window shop,” and sometimes pick up a thing or two.

Today, a $5+ set of 12 soft pastels caught my eye. I don’t know why. I had never used them before, my only pastel-related experience being a poor understanding of how oil pastels worked as a kid. But, soft pastels? I honestly didn’t even know what they were. Something told me to grab them.

By evening time, I had watched a few YouTube videos on working with them. I was in for a surprise. These tiny chalk-like squares of pigment and binder laid down color beautifully. Before I knew it, I had finished my first soft pastel drawing.

Unlike colored pencils, which take me days to fill in the space, I could sketch and color in a single session. It was ideal timing finding these. After my previous nine-day struggle through my last drawing, I needed something simpler. I needed to feel like I was not taking on a massive project. And, soft pastels were the answer.

I didn’t use any noteworthy materials for this drawing. Just my cheap Walmart pastels and sketchbook.

I have some larger art projects in mind that I’ve been itching to get to, but I’m also trying to avoid burnout after wrapping up a colored-pencil drawing earlier in the week. I still wanted to do something this weekend as long as it didn’t eat up too much time.

Last night, I doodled a quick watercolor painting idea, but nothing really came of it. I’m still slowly learning that medium. So, I decided to switch back to soft pastels. After a successful first drawing with them, I scoured YouTube for more tutorials and landed on one for a walking path next to some colorful trees. It looked more complex than my first project but simple enough to attempt.

The following is the end result:

I had trouble with my limited palette of 12 colors and not really knowing how to mix soft pastels just right yet. There are some things I would have done differently, particularly with the tree tops. However, I’m generally happy with the end result considering this is only my second project with pastels.

I did switch over to my 9”x12” Strathmore 300 Series Bristol Vellum Pad for this one. It picks up color better than my sketchpad, but I have ordered actual pastel paper for future projects.

My sister asked if I would draw a sun and moon picture. I had no idea what she was talking about, so I asked for some examples. Eventually, I pulled up some source material to work from.

The style was a bit outside my wheelhouse, but I felt like it would be a good learning opportunity. There were a ton of gradients in this but not many base colors. Mostly, I stuck with Poppy Red, Magenta, Canary Yellow, Violet, and Parrot Green. There were a few others in there, but almost every part of the drawing was a blend of two or more of those colors.

It took eight days in total to complete this project. The gallery below is shown in reverse-chronological order.

The tools I used were:

• Strathmore 300 Series Bristol Vellum Pad, 9”x12”.
• Ticonderoga HB (#2) Pencils.
• Prismacolor Premier Coloring Pencils.
• Mungyo Soft Pastels.
• Tachikawa Comic Pen Nib Holder.
• Zebra Comic G Model Chrome Pen Nib.
• Deleter Manga Ink, Black 4.
• Prismacolor Premier Illustration Markers.
• Tombow Mono Zero Eraser.
• Mr. Pen Erasers.

After the eight-day run it took to finish the sun and moon drawing for my sister, I needed a break from big projects. That is one of the reasons I am happy to have recently discovered the joy of working with soft pastels. I can work through a 9”x12” sized drawing in a single session. It is low pressure. If I mess up too bad, there is no harm in just trashing it.

But, I am generally happy with my third soft pastel drawing. I followed through with a YouTube tutorial. Of course, mine is nowhere near as great as the original, but I am still learning.

The following is the end result:

The tools I used were:

• Strathmore 400 Series Pastel Pad, 9”x12”.
• Mungyo Soft Pastels.
• Derwent Pastel Pencils.

This was my first time using the new pastel pad, having used both sketching and Bristol vellum paper in previous drawings. I am not sure how I feel about it yet. It was definitely a different surface, and I don’t know that it picked up color any better. It could have been the new pastels or even just me being a bit tired. I will definitely experiment more.

In keeping with the spirit of experimenting with various mediums in my journey as an artist, I tried oil pastels tonight. I received these as part of a beginner’s artist set during my school years. I remember trying them once or twice, but I had no idea how they worked. They sort of seemed like weird, oily color crayons that were not worth my time.

As I cleaned out my office and art supplies a few weeks ago, I nearly put them in a donation box. That is where the remaining pieces of the original set went. However, there was some unknown force that told me to hold onto the oil pastels. Maybe I’d use them sometime.

Looking for a quick and relatively easy art project for the night, I searched around for a tutorial, finding a simple sunflower to try. I pulled out the old oil pastels, and the following is the result:

The tools I used were:

• Strathmore 400 Series Pastel Pad, 9”x12”.
• Old oil pastels.

This was my second time using the new pastel pad. It felt like oil pastels worked better with it than soft (chalk) pastels.

After trying oil pastels, a medium I had not attempted since my formative years, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to dive into something that I really had not used in ages: color crayons. Yes, those wax crayons that we all learn to use in our youth.

I had an old box lying around, but I bought some new sets during my weekly shopping adventure. They are so cheap that they only set me back about $10 for a total of 176 crayons. I got the big 120 Crayola box and smaller 24 and 32 counts of their Colors of Kindness and Colors of the World specialty boxes, respectively.

For this first attempt, I only used the Colors of Kindness box. It had a lot of unique colors that were fun to work with.

I completed the work over a couple of easy-going nights, and the following is the result (also, yes, I accidentally put the shadow on the right side):

The tools I used were:

• Crayola Colors of Kindness Crayons.
• Generic Sketchpad.
• Ticonderoga HB (#2) Pencils.
• Prismacolor Premier Illustration Markers.
• Brisk Learner White Gel Pens.
• Mungyo Soft Pastels.

So, technically, this was mixed media instead of just crayons. To get the pure blacks and whites, I needed to use pens. For the background, I just shaded it in with a soft pastel stick. But, the primary drawing was done with the crayons.

I had fun with this, and that is always the point. Art should never feel like work. It should be relaxing, and sometimes that means just breaking out a medium from childhood.

Also, have you smelled a fresh box of wax crayons lately? Try it sometime. It’s like a sensory overload of nostalgia all for about $2.

I continue to enjoy soft pastels and their ease of laying down color. It is sort of like being a kid again with the messiness of the medium but an adult-like version that allows the creation of something akin to decent art.

I followed through with another tutorial, this time creating a daisy. I am happy with the end result. Soft pastel work also looks much better in person than viewing it digitally here on the web, and I cannot wait to hang this one in my office/art room.

Oh, yeah, that’s a project I started over the weekend. I now have two walls decorated with my drawing work from the last couple of months. One for portraits and another for landscapes. I still have a bit of work left on tidying up the room. Maybe I will be able to wrap that up this week and share.

As for this latest drawing, I feel like I really started to get the feel for pastel paper. It felt so different from other paper the last time I tried soft pastels that I wasn’t sure I would use it again. However, I am glad I stuck with it. Mostly, I just needed to use more pressure at times to really dig the colors into it and go lighter where I wanted the texture to bleed through.

Anyway, here is the daisy drawing:

The tools I used were:

• Strathmore 400 Series Pastel Pad, 9”x12”.
• Mungyo Soft Pastels.
• Derwent Pastel Pencils.

Officially, this is the first blog post I have ever written in Blush. Well, technically, I have been writing in it for over three years now. But, I only recently came up with a real name for the project.

Blush is a PHP-based, flat-file CMS that I have been developing since late 2018. OK, well, maybe not actively developing that entire time. It’s more like I built the bulk of it over a weekend and just fixed stuff along the way.

It has gone through a few iterations in that time. But, as any programmer can tell you, naming the thing you have built is the toughest part. The 2018-era name was probably not PC. I never liked it anyway. Then, I had the perfect name somewhere between then and now, but another software developer beat me to it in the same CMS/framework space.

After a brainstorming session that managed to spread itself across several weeks recently, I landed on Blush. I’ll dive into the “why” behind that name down the road.

I figured it was finally time to share it with the world. I mean, really share it with the world (technically, the source code has been public since I started using it). I had the name. It was finally time.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been holed up in the lab, rewriting most of the original code from scratch. Much of the work consisted of implementing ideas I haven’t gotten around to in the last few years. Some of it was new stuff that I have learned as a programmer or just new things I picked up in the last few days.

Today, I am proud to announce version 1.0.0-alpha. No, not even a beta yet. But, I’m shipping something.

For those who want to give it a whirl, install the Blush repo via Composer. If you just want to check out the underlying code for the framework/CMS, see the Blush Framework.

I am certain that I will be writing more about Blush in the coming weeks and months, perhaps even launching a separate website.

I had planned to write more about the alpha launch, but a three-hour session of dealing with broken caching pushed my plans back. I’m barely getting this thing launched within the weekend before the real world comes knocking on the door in the morning.

When I released Blush 1.0-alpha two weeks ago, I don’t think I entirely grasped what I was getting myself into. For the first time, I was announcing the release of my very own flat-file CMS to the world. Sure, I had been running some mangled version of it here on my site since 2018, but this was a different venture. This time, it was for others.

Today, that reality is hitting even harder. An alpha release signals that the software is more-or-less (less, in my case) ready for developers to give it a whirl. But, a beta, that’s when things get real. The public APIs are stable enough for testing with a wider crowd. And, with any luck, nothing breaks entirely.

So, here we are, somewhere on the rickety edge, with something that probably ought not exist. But, we are here anyway.

Since the alpha release, I have pretty much rewritten everything. I won’t list all the changes here. Feel free to browse the commit log if you’re into that sort of torture.

For now, it is time to continue pushing forward, fixing any pesky bugs, and getting this thing ready for its 1.0 debut.

Speaking of version 1.0, I am tentatively scheduling it for release on April 3. That’s two weeks from now. In the meantime, feel free to give it a run.

• Blush App — Install this!
• Blush Framework — The CMS framework (runs under the hood).

Sorry, the documentation is almost non-existent at this point. Enjoy!