The past few days have seen me relaxing a bit. It was a great 2013, no complaints there, but it was also rather loaded with work and I missed downtime to sketch and play. I am not the kind of person who comes up with New Year’s resolutions, really. Are you?

Here’s the thing: Life’s too short to wait until early January to change whatever you feel should be changed. As a good friend of mine once told me, and it is true: If you want to change a particular habit like not brushing teeth long enough: Trust the plasticity of your brain and its sublime superpowers… just convince yourself doing it (like brushing every day at 10 pm for 3 minutes) for two weeks, and it will have become a new habit. And you will be doing it without even thinking about it.

So you see: No New Year’s resolutions here. But a few sketches over the holidays. And a book about Photoshop.

That’s what I did as good as I could these days, trying to understand Photoshop a touch better, and trying to advance a bit with watercolor on my cintiq, using photoshop. And yes, of course, you might ask ,why bothering  emulating when the real thing is the real thing and out there, too? Well…. I do it because!

Photoshop is very forgiving, too. That helps.

The object yesterday was a blooming jasmine twig that I cut from the jasmine bush, blooming in the basements, saved in November from the cold. Like every year: Amazing. So creamy and rich, yet delicate, and so far not overpowering, but this will change: Most buds are not open, yet.

To paint something that is white with water colors on white paper is not easy. The result of my trials, in low resolution for the “featured image” section of this blog, is today’s picture. I uploaded a higher resolution version to facebook.

But now, the happy days of playing and fooling around are over. Heading back to the factory, filling up those empty shelves. I hope your start into 2014 was great! Welcome again to 2014: Let’s hope for best…