Finishing up this watercolor cactus

On December 1st, I did a short watercolor demonstration for East Valley Artists. I painted a cactus live on their Facebook page as part of a series of live demonstrations performed during their annual show and sale. It was my first time going live for a demo. It was quite strange – the only other time I’ve done a virtual demonstration was earlier this year, and that one was on zoom. Zoom was surprisingly comfortable for me. I was able to set up an overhead camera and still view the meeting on my desktop computer, and viewers were able to unmute themselves to ask questions. That one was actually a paint-along, so people were replicating what I was doing. The Facebook demo was harder for me to manage because I had to keep looking up to read questions and comments instead of just listening for them. And, to be honest, I was less prepared for that one since I had been busy working on the annual show every day leading up to the demo. Nevertheless, I put down a few layers of paint that day. It wasn’t complete at the end of the demo though, so today, on the last day of 2020, I decided to finish it up with one more layer. Here is a time lapse showing that final layer of dark tones going in. Enjoy… and Happy New Year!