rain barrel painting

A hand painted rain barrel commissioned by The Saugatuck Center For The Arts and The Outdoor Discovery Center in West Michigan, celebrating the Kalamazoo River and the surrounding habitat.

I was one of 12 local artists who got to design and paint a barrel, which are now scattered throughout the Saugatuck/Douglas/Fennville area.

As a project, I found this pretty stretching and creatively vulnerable as I am not a painter, and mostly work in a digital medium. I spent a lot of time trying to map out what I would paint in Procreate - mostly procrastinating from actually getting started...

But by the time I finally got going, I had a lot of fun and enjoyed the process. To me, the final product wasn't as good as I hoped it might be, and it definitely wasn't as bad as I feared it might be. It falls somewhere in between - a stepping stone towards more physical work!