When the local Arboretum offered a day-long course on watercolour journaling, I instantly wanted to do it. While the self-permission took considerably longer given the self torture of questions like "shouldn't I work on my dissertation", shouldn't I work on my business" and shouldn't I focus on the house", doing something that demonstrated zero end-game productivity still won. It was definitely worth my time as I learned a great deal about watercolour technique and how to develop my own style.Elizabeth Ellison was a wonderful instructor; encouraging while guiding at the same time. She oversaw the rubbishing of my "bad" pre-mixed greens, and I gathered enough courage to create my own secondary colours. I must say, I preferred my own mixture. The sustaining messages of my life has been to only use clean colors by mixing only a couple of colours; avoiding the tempting muddiness that pre-mixed colours or many colours can produce. This was strongly emphasized again. And again. Which is good - being reminded prevents me from being lazy.
While the course was about creating a journal with supporting watercolours to provide imagery on what you're writing, the demand of the participants was mostly around painting technique, in which the instructor was very obliging. After I timidly poked about with the first flower (above), I knew that to gain value for myself, I needed to tackle the stuff that scared me to death.
- Green
- Mountains
- Trees
Her example was stunning, but I wasn't too displeased with my sad "copy" of her demonstration. For the first time in my short watercolouring lack of career, I was able to actually produce something that looked marginly like mountains. What was very pleasing was that I could see my errors and know how to correct them in the future.
This one probably is pretty scary, but trust me, it's a good tree. It's a freakingly good tree by my past standards. I have often heard the watercolouring adage that you start with light and add the dark. However, in my brain, there was an exception when it came to trees. So when she watched me do a non-photographed tree (very scary), she thankfully caught me little self-made exception and I started over. I was informed to stop being scared of dark colours and allow my branches to actually extend beyond the foliage. Oh.
It was an awesome day. Learned so much. Dropped off at a lot of fear. Picked up a lot of desire for experimentation. Need to buy a watercolour book that I can treat as a journal for my travels. Very excited!
