100 Watercolors #93 - Give Up

Sometimes the odds are just stacked against you!  It was hard for me to come up with an illustration for this theme.  I'm more of a "Never Give Up" kind of guy...

The next theme: Last Hope!

100 Watercolors #92 - All That I Have

This seems like as good a time as any to officially announce that my wife Claire and I are going to be moving (yet again) at the end of July.  This time we are moving to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where Claire grew up and where both of her parents still live.  The long and short of it is that the Bay Area has become too expensive for us!  We will miss all of our great friends who live here.

Anyway, this decision was definitely weighing on my mind when I came up with the illustration for this week's theme.

The next theme: Give Up!

100 Watercolors #91 - Drowning

I felt pretty good about the inversion of this theme.

The next theme: All That I Have!

100 Watercolors #90 - Triangle

I wanted to do a love triangle for this one and the first setting that popped into my mind was a coffee shop.  This is probably due to the influence of the classic zine, Coffee Shop Crushes which was co-edited by my old pal Nicole Georges!

The next theme: Drowning!

100 Watercolors #89 - Through the Fire

This one is kind of dark, but it really makes me laugh.  Sorry marshmallows!

The next theme: Triangle!

100 Watercolors #88 - Pain

Ironically, the day after I sketched out the idea for this theme, I visited my new dentist for the first time and had a completely pain-free experience.  It was the first time that had ever happened in my entire life however, so I felt no guilt in following through with the inking and painting of this piece!

The next theme: Through the Fire!

100 Watercolors #87 - Food

This was another one where I had a lot of fun playing with multiple meanings of the theme.  It was also really fun to paint with some very dark areas, all the way up to some controlled use of white.

The next theme: Pain!

100 Watercolors #86 - Seeing Red

I was glad with this one, that I was able to get at both the figurative and literal meaning of the theme. :)

The next theme: Food!

100 Watercolors #85 - Spiral

For this one, I reused the idea I had developed for the cover of Ramen Music #8.  This one was has a simple composition, but it took a really long time to paint because I had to layer that very light blue on the keys over and over again.  Watercolors definitely take a lot of patience!

The next theme: Seeing Red!