#30x30DirectWatercolor 2025 : A Month of Miniatures!

We’ve just finished the #30x30DirectWatercolor marathon for 2025! We had approximately 400 participants from all over the world, sharing their work, encouraging each other, and creating a short lived but intense community of artists! As always, this is the highlight of my year :)

This year I had a grand plan: Painting in miniature is a super fast, and flexible way to explore compositions and colors; and then I’ll just take my favorites and re-work them at scale. From tiny, to wall-sized!

So in reality, my ‘wall sized’ enlargements didn’t work out to my satisfaction. (But that’s ok!)

There’s vast difference in the kind of mark-making you can produce with a given set of brushes. Those same brushes that are huge when you’re working on a 4″ study are of course impossibly tiny on a 40″ painting. This seems obvious, but it’s not instinctual. I did attempt to move to larger brushes, and bigger volumes of paint – but the reality is these things need to be MUCH BIGGER than I realized.

In the spirit of real study – failing to achieve something is still valuable! This was an true learning experince, and I feel I got tremendous value out of this year’s marathon.

On the upside; I find working small a real joy! I was able to very easily make 60 paintings in a fraction of of the time I would normally spend on 30.

Making 4 inch or 7 inch studied was just as satisfying to me as finishing a masterpiece:) I just need to continue working on capturing that vibe. Figuring out how to translate what I love about mark-making at this scale, and take it into the larger forms.

An so: for anyone who is curious; here are links to the day-by-day diary of my 2025 thirty day marathon!