Anusmita Roy

Day 10.
Two commission oil paintings. One oil pastel study. And a hundred quiet lessons happening all at once.
Ganesh ji is being built slowly — layer by layer, the way devotion works. I forgot one of his four hands during the block-in. No panic. No starting over. Layers exist for exactly that reason — they hold space for your mistakes and let you find your way back. That's not just a painting technique. That's a philosophy.
Hanuman ji is nearly 70% there, the face almost complete. This one — raw, direct, no room to hide behind drying time. It demands presence. It asks you to trust your hand before your mind catches up.
And then there's the female portrait in oil pastels — a medium I once dismissed as too simple, too childlike. I was wrong. Oil pastels don't forgive easily, but when you stop fighting them, they show you something honest.
What's shifting isn't just my technique.
It's my relationship with not-knowing.
The willingness to be mid-layer, mid-thought, mid-becoming — and stay anyway.
A lot is unfinished right now.
But unfinished doesn't mean broken.
It means alive.
If you're in that in-between place — where nothing feels complete but something is clearly shifting — save this post and come back to it on a hard day.
And tell me below: What are you in the middle of right now? 👇

11:45 PM. Saturday night. Day 6. 🎨
The house is quiet. No distractions, no excuses. Just me, my watercolours, and a still life I actually set up in real life — not a photo, not a reference image. The real thing, sitting right in front of me.
There's something different about painting from life. It's uncomfortable in a way a photo never is. The shadows keep shifting. The objects look different every time you glance up. You can't pause it, zoom in, or adjust the brightness. You just have to look harder.
And tonight I did.
Was the painting good? Not really. But was it better than Day 5? Yes. Genuinely, visibly better. And at this stage of my journey, that's everything.
I haven't painted watercolour seriously in years. No classes, no coach — just me deciding to pick it up again and document every single day honestly. The late nights, the frustrating sessions, the small quiet wins that nobody else might notice but I do.
Tonight felt like one of those small wins.
11:45 PM is actually my favourite time to paint. The world slows down. There's no pressure to be productive or impressive. It's just you and the work — and something about that silence makes the brush feel lighter.
If you're on your own quiet creative journey right now — learning something slowly, imperfectly, stubbornly — I see you. Keep going. 🙌
Follow along for Day 7 — I'm not stopping, and I'm not pretending it's pretty. 💛