Besides landscape, color is another subject that interests and confuses me. In this challenge, I want to learn more about colors and push my color choices to tell the story better.

These three paintings below are my efforts to use purple as cold tones instead of just blue like usual.

And I’m getting better at painting night scenes, the key for me is to just forget the real scenes and paint what I think of them. It’s not that I’m perfect at night lighting now, after the first “a-ha” moment, I realize I keep using the same combination of blue and yellow.

And I guess I grasp the idea of painting light and shadow, particular soft lighting in normal days. Birds have become a recurring subject to add interesting to my paintings now. And also Hanoi old houses.

Flowers is still the subject I chose whenever I felt like I have nothing to paint. This does not mean they are easy, on the other hand, I often fell in the trap of details with all these petals and branches.

I was able to use up almost all the references I have shot, particularly those around my house. A square frame somehow affected how I chose and composed the layout, I did use stable and front view more than usual.

In the end, I enjoyed this challenge even though it caused a good deal of stress, because this coincided with a stressful period of my life. But I believed it kept me grounded in a time of feeling lost and messed up with my direction. When a new day came, meaning a new card to paint, I started without knowing what or how I should paint, yet I still made it. It reminded to trust myself to figure things out and do things step by step.