December was dominated by Triadvent, which I retro’d separately, but there are a few more things to mention – small pieces and blog work that I did at the end of December!
Housekeeping
I did a little reorganizing of the pages in the Watercolor Learning Resources section. I added a page called Teachers I Love, where I’ve profiled Kolbie Blume, Claire Giordano, Shelby Thayne, Maria Coryell-Martin, and Maria Smirnova. This gives me one place to refer to all my work for those teachers, and keeps me from having to type out an increasingly long list of links each time I mention them.
I also added a page called My Watercolor Bookshelf where I’m keeping track of the books I’ve posted about, especially those I’ve posted about multiple times, or where I’m tracking longer readthroughs. I think this may become increasingly relevant if I continue to do book deep dives.
Paintings (Other than Triadvent)
Tutorial
A couple of quick ones for Claire Giordano’s Winter Sunset (free recorded class from last year).
Sky Sketchbook
I remembered about my Sky Sketchbook!
Painted from memory, though it’s also something I photographed.
A windowscape I didn’t photograph.
Above are two swings at a post-dusk wetland scene that I observed from a car window and didn’t photograph. I noted the strangeness of bright pastel periwinkle clouds against a lower-chroma, red-orange sky. In my first attempt, I did the clouds darker, and in the second, I did the background sky darker, which I think is closer to the truth. In both, I used gouache for the clouds and watercolor for the rest.
This was also a windowscape! In many ways it’s slapdash, but I think it captured something of the snowy feeling. Time was of the essence because the snow melted the next day.
Comments
3 responses to “Monthly Retrospective: December 2025”
If you want to do more blog maintenance, your Post Archive page has no links after August 2025 and the new pages above don’t have links on the main page.
Thanks so much for all the posts this year. The Trivent series was a real eye opener for me.
Thanks for letting me know, I rely on readers to alert me of broken stuff because I’m probably the last person to click around!
I just went into the top bar and replaced the Supplies Guide link with a more general Resources link. The Resources page has links to the Supplies Guide, Teachers I Love, My Watercolor Bookshelf, and a new page with color-specific resources.
I’m having trouble replicating the issue with the Post Archive. For me, the top bar “Post Archive” link takes me to:
https://www.idyllsketching.com/post-archive/
… which has a list of all the years. If I then click on 2025 say, it links here:
https://www.idyllsketching.com/2025/
… where I can my most recent December posts.
What is happening for you? Does it help to clear your cache?
I am accessing it from an iPad and the most recent post visible is August 1 2025. Clearing the history didn’t change that. I also can’t see the resources page, only the supplies guide. A weird glitch.