Welcome to Painted Picnic. I started this blog because I have been obsessed with food for as long as I can remember. I grew up loving the illustrations of feasts in storybooks and picking out the notebooks with cupcakes on the front for school. I get new ornaments every year for Christmas and at least half of mine are shaped like dessert in some form or another. When I started watercolor painting, at age twelve, all of my paintings were of food.

As an adult, I find that I have not even slightly changed in regards to food. I still pour over the descriptions of meals in books. I’m still about 200% more likely to buy something if it has a food pattern. I read books about food history for fun. I have more cookbooks than I will ever be able to use, but I still always want more.

My relationship with art has been less steady. I learned watercolors, sewing, embroidery, and knitting from my Grandma as I grew up. I loved them all, but I always struggled the most with watercolors. The other crafts were straightforward repeat the motion, follow the pattern, try to be neat and even. Watercolors had so many more possibilities, but with that, so many more techniques to fail at. It was like drawing except I couldn’t just erase and start again. And I hated that.

I stopped doing watercolors for years while I finished high school and college. I studied Film & Media Studies at UCSB, and focused my attention on digital art, which I loved because of that beautiful little “undo” button. After graduating, my boyfriend encouraged me to get back into drawing and painting and I began to keep a sketchbook. I realized around this time that I really did love watercolors, what I hated was not being able to do justice to the image in my head. Essentially, I hated not being good at watercolors. So I came up with a plan. What if I came up with a project that allowed me to focus on all my favorite things, while also holding me accountable to consistently completing paintings and improving my techniques What if that project allowed me to get feedback from others and connect to a supportive community What if that project also just happened to make my life a little bit more fun