I went for a swim and saw the beginnings of a storm

I made this painting on paper using a combination of acrylics and colored pencils. I do most of my work on canvas, and until July of 2025, it had been a long time since I had made a fully fleshed-out artwork on paper.

July’s painting process made me fall deeply in love with working on paper; dragging colored pencils across a textured sheet was like finally scratching an itch, and painting patterns over the pencil felt like cold ointment on dry skin. I was chasing the same high when I decided to do this painting on paper. However, I was not in the same serene frame of mind. An abundance of admin work meant I was starting my painting a week later than usual, and to be honest, I was counting on a magical lightning bolt of creative genius to guide me through this piece. But as things often go, quite the opposite happened.

I had a lot of trouble executing the idea and started and abandoned three different paintings. When I work on canvas, I always paint over my mistakes and start over several times until the painting begins to carve itself out; but paper is less forgiving, you can’t layer too much on a paper, it will rip. If you make a visible mistake, you have to start over, and all the abandoned sheets of paper begin to visually quantify your ‘mistakes’. Having all the unfinished sheets of paper on my desk while I worked made me focus more on all the things that hadn’t worked instead of what could work.

Between the third and fourth piece, I had one restless night of sleep, and I forcefully drove myself to the beach early morning. I regularly visit the ocean, and owe any creative success I have had to time spent swimming in bodies of water. But since it’s hurricane season, my visiting hours have been nonexistent recently.

The sun was blazing when I arrived, and the sea was a temperate sky blue. I anxiously swam past the break point and put my head underwater, but couldn’t get myself to be in the moment; my incomplete painting was haunting me, so I decided to go back to shore. Just as I was about to leave the water, I looked up and watched grey-blue spirals rapidly form. Once my feet were at the shoreline, I turned around and saw swaths of deep teal encroach on the remaining sky-blue bits of water. By the time I reached my belongings on the sand, I was completely drenched. I had a very long walk back to my car, and about halfway through, the situation became funny. I smiled like a girl at the end of a 2000’s Rom-com all the way home, I knew what I was going to paint.

The original is 8x11.5" in size and was created using gouache and pencils on paper.