I have never seen a seagull yet but I really like painting it. Seagull looks cool to me because it has a very minimalistic characteristics of white feathers, yellow beak and gray wings. All throughout my nautical paintings, the boats were surrounded by seagulls. The seagulls breaks the monotony of the boats. The skies look so blank without them. So I decided to create a painting dedicated for seagull.

After a long time I bring out my Liquitex Neutral Gray and used it as the midtone for the body of the seagull while the highlight is Titanium White. The wing is a combination of Prussian Blue and Heavy Body Ivory Black. The beak is Cadmium Yellow with Cadmium Red and the legs are Cadmium Red and Titanium white to make it pinkish. The seagull is sitting on a wood with Burn Sienna color. The time of the day is sunset with the gradation of orange yellow and purplish gray. And here is the breakthrough – I think I was able to find the mixture for anthraquinone blue which is the color of the sea in the painting. I saw this color on Golden Artist Colors paints although I haven’t got one because it is not available. It may look like an Ultramarine but this is a Prussian with Cadmium Red. It matches well with the Burnt Sienna.

I love the tranquility of the painting. I guess it’s what seagull projects – the calmness of sunset. I do not know why my painting starts to calm down. Probably because I accept my life as a painter now although its what I have always wanted when I was child. I know I am still in the process of learning. It has been two years already since I started to paint. Painting for me works in three ways – painting itself, videography and search engine optimization. It pushed me to realms that is outside the comfort of my graphic design world. Through painting I appreciated chemistry because it feels like working on a laboratory when mixing colors, medium and spirits. Videography involves filming the videos, doing scripts and editing. It also provides me with the energy and discipline to post everyday. Painting as a vlog is very sustainable compared to traveling. I also started to study search engine optimization because I want to make my videos searchable in Youtube and then migrate my blogs here in WordPress because I am hoping that this will be profitable in the future.

You see in every painting, there is an underlying story. These are the things playing inside my head. Although I haven’t got so much monetary returns, somehow I was able to build my channels in Youtube, Tiktok and here in WordPress. I also have Instagram BTW. These channels serves also as a portfolio for my clients for my video editing services.

I often ask myself why am I doing this. It is the same thing that I ask myself before when I was studying graphic design. Like why am I doing this only to realize that it will be my lifeboat and my profession. I am positive that someday everything will fall into place once I found with myself. Much like this painting of the seagull, the atmosphere will calm down. We all need take a rest once in a while.