06/05/2026
Rhinestone Fest 2026 is here baby!!!
Fifth year drawing the patron saint of East Tennessee! I’ve been digging this tradition and love seeing all y’all coming through with my dolly shirts from years gone by. Which, some of y’all have been wearing those out, so for this year only, I am bringing back ALL the old shirts! 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025 are reprinted!
This year, I am channeling my Dogwood energy! I mentioned that triangle of happiness in the last post (see glass side). 1. Co Chair which is so wonderful
2. All the Dogwood Goblets that I’ve been making this year.
3. And featuring Dogwood Flowers as the Mandala component for this drawing.
Year of the Dogwood for this duder over here.
Instead of posting all the drawing tips and tricks, Im just putting up alot of the different steps that I went through to finish this drawing. There must have been 100+ layers in total. I tend to max out the memory capacity on Concepts pretty fast, so I’ll set up multiple files to finish different parts of the drawing before flattening them all into png’s for the final assembly. That’s also the reason why I have so many process images.
Long story short, or still long, whatever…
I’ll do a photo collage to figure out over all idea.
Main outlines, & separate inner outlines
Opaque base color layer
Then start doing separate watercolor layers for each element. Focusing on the mid tones and form
A dark water color layer for each part
A super bright watercolor layer on top of all those watercolor layers.
And then I’ll typically do a pencil layer for hats, hair, clothes, etc and sandwich it somewhere in between the watercolor layers.
But I like to keep my hi, mids and low tones in a drawing separate so I can push and pull them…kinda like photography editing I guess.
Say once everything is done, but the highlights are popping enough, I can double that layer. Or if the dark is too much, I can add some transparency to just the dark layer. Or use some soft masks.
Yeah, so I totally went into a good bit of detail!
Anyway, Cheers Y’all!!!!
p.s. I made Prints of each design this year!!! Whoop whoop
