A Happy Little Boat
Next to a Happy Little Stream
I have finally started watercolor again. I used to paint quite a bit, but life happened. Then it seemed too daunting to start. “What do you mean I have to get out the paints and the brushes and the paper? What do I even want to spend time painting? Blah blah blah.”
I jumped back in with a very quick, very easy painting of a stream in a field. It was a tutorial from Ellen Crimi-Trent. She has a nice YouTube page with tons of tutorials. I’m actually taking a day long class with her in March, so that was one motivator to get me painting again. I can’t just show up there with a musty box of paints and brushes and be like, “Tada! I’m here!”
It’s even more daunting to think about painting something a little more realistic and spending three or four hours (or five or six hours) on one thing. I just have to remind myself that it’s ok to work on something in stages or chunks of time. I don’t have to pull an all nighter on some painting. It’s about process, not finished product. It’s about getting into that flow state where you mind becomes totally absorbed with the task at hand and nothing else. No worrying about work or life.
I decided to give a more detailed painting a shot this week. I enjoy tutorials from an Australian woman, Louise De Masi, who has very detailed tutorials on birds and flowers and things I enjoy painting. I decided to paint a relaxing boat on water painting because I need help getting water to look right. It’s surprisingly kind of hard, at least for me.
I drew the boat on my watercolor paper, and this was how it looked after masking off the boat and giving it the first layer of a blue wash.
After about three hours total over two days of painting, I am calling this one finished. I could fiddle with it forever, but I won’t. It was a very meditative process, and before I knew it, an hour would fly by. Here’s the finished painting. I already see things I would do differently, but it was nice to practice painting water and getting a better feel for how to make it look decent and not like a bunch of dash marks on paper.
I love this one! I really like the reflection of the boat in the water. Glad you picked up the paints again.
Je ne savais pas que tu parlais francais.