Something fun for spring

Okay, you may not consider it fun, but I do. Today’s post celebrates my girlish passion for a new box of crayons, my half-hearted sidesteps into art, and my recent discovery of painting with watercolors. 

After months of cajoling, a neighbor — who also happens to be a watercolor artist and teacher — agreed to offer a class to some of us wanting to flex our artistic muscle. And now I’m hooked. Watercolors are not easy and there is a lot of technique to learn (the most basic being how do you make the water and the paint work together?), but I’ve found it to be a welcome challenge, a good test for my latent creative muscles, and, therefore, a bit addictive. 

I have always loved the idea of drawing and coloring. A new box of crayons could set this girl off on artistic adventures for days. When I was in junior high and high school, my dad was an avid photographer. He recognized my artistic bent and bought me the paints and brushes to hand color some photos. We were just getting really good when color photography crept in and stole our thunder!

In college I was able to take a few studio art classes in drawing, painting and printmaking for half credit (therefore requiring much less work) and scratch my creative itch. I loved it! Studio classes were a nice break from books and the library, and I discovered some like-minded friends in the process. We were not “arty” like the art majors (a terrible generalization I’m sure), but in retrospect I think we were engaging in a bit of art therapy at a challenging time in our lives. 

In the intervening years, my writing profession — pages and pages of ad copy, newsletter and magazine copy and the accompanying layout sometimes required made it hard to separate the art from the words. I was picky, picky, picky about color, type face, and photos, what worked and what did not, all of which probably made me a difficult co-worker from time to time. Meanwhile, away from work, my personal passion for decorating and collecting grew. You can see how I fed that artsy muscle. 

Fast-forward to the present, where watercolors have become an increasingly popular hobby. It turns out several of us were eager to try; we just needed a teacher. And now, some of us are really hooked. I’m not at all good, I paint too fast, I don’t always use the water to great effect, and I’m just beginning to appreciate the value of mixing colors from red, blue and yellow instead of being seduced by the other colors in the paint box. Right now I’m practicing small “studies” like individual flowers to learn and practice techniques and explore the use of paint and water together. The exploration is at once engaging and — as you can see — primitive. 

One of the most interesting aspects of this process is how differently we each approach the same lesson and paint the same flower. Talk about the “eye of the beholder.” I’ve also begun to mentally consider other subjects to paint. In class we have focused on simple floral forms, but what about fruit or vegetables or greenery? My imagination runs wild…

It’s fun at this stage in life to embrace a new challenge, to look forward to carving out time to paint, to make new friends who share your new interest. I’ve even carved out some “studio space” in our loft. (Which is really just my way off spreading out in safer space than the kitchen island!)

What’s on your creative challenge “wish list” ? Let’s talk about the risks and rewards of tackling something new.

Thank you so much for stopping by and reading along with me. See you again soon!