My body was full of knotted muscles so I had booked a two-hour Zennya massage last night. At the end of the session I was already snoring so I just went straight to bed and forgot about everything else.

Today, I was bombarded with edits (which was fine) and hiring chores/issues (which was not fine) that I had suffered through diarrhea the entire day due to too much stomach acids. I think I had been going to the bathroom 10x already. It seems like my proton pump inhibitor (esomeprazole) is not doing its job. If by next week I’ll still be like this (geez I’m in Singapore 🤦‍♀️), then it seems like I need to have that endoscopy to see whether I already have peptic ulcers.

I think I need to decompress for a bit.

Let’s see what I can come up with later.

I redid this Binangonan sunset that I drew last year. This time, I did not resort to using fine liners to define plants and I am now more light-handed when it comes to sky colors compared to the first drawing. This paper is still very wet so I will just revisit this tomorrow when it’s completely dry.

Why did I do this?

Nothing. Just to track my progress when it comes to technique i.e. showing the opacity and how to do reflections on water. The first time I did this, Laguna Lake didn’t look like a lake at all; it was just a muddy valley. Now at least there’s a semblance of water reflecting the sky. I also mixed cadmium yellow + cobalt violet and cadmium orange + cobalt violet to produce different browns for the lake shore that would go with sunset and the lake. For the other part of the lake, it was a mixture of imperial violet + blue gray deep of varying degrees. Using the pre-mixed browns and grays made my first drawing muddy and it lacked opacity that is needed when sunlight changes every second. Watching other artists on Instagram is helping me to rely less on pre-mixed colors and create my own.

This is still ugly in my eyes so I need to continue improving this. Probably next year.